Kvennavagn and Karlvagn
by TardisInWonderland
Summary: Recovery, reform, and regret can complicate even the simplest of feelings.
1. Chapter 1

So, basically, my lovely friend Molly prompted me with a coffee shop AU like a thousand years ago, and recently decided it should be a tasertricks AU. Well, I've obviously never written tasertricks before, so... Long story short, this was supposed to be a warm-up drabble to get a feel for the characters and it ran away from me. Here, Molly, have this while I go work on your ACTUAL fic.

* * *

"You want to open a wormhole?"

"Yes."

"But how do we know that it'll open where we want it to?"

"I just do. We'll use the tesseract."

"Are you sure the tesseract can do that on its own?"

"Of course I am!"

"I didn't think we had the thing! Didn't your space boyfriend take it back with him?"

"Yep, but we've received some long-range messages over the past few days."

"Indicating?"

"Well… we don't actually know yet, but we think we're going to have some visitors."

Darcy groaned. The last thing she needed right now was space travel to a different world to puzzle out. She could barely keep up with Jane's science babble on a good day, usually just sticking to the computer programming involved with whatever her discoveries happened to be.

However, new messages meant decoding new messages, and it also meant that was Darcy's project for the day. She was starting to think that she should have majored in linguistics, or biology, or physics, or chemistry, or… basically anything but political science.

It would probably come in handy right now.

It wasn't as if she'd planned to become highly involved with a secret government agency that happened to specialize in all the things that ordinary people weren't supposed to know. A big blonde guy in weird clothes just dropped out of the sky, and well… things escalated. Yes, if anyone was to blame, it was probably Thor. Not that she could actually bring herself to blame him- he was far too nice for that- but anytime she had a complaint about her job she would mentally give the guy a salute.

Not that this was a bad job, really. It came with an apartment (shared with Jane, but large enough that it wasn't cramped), a decent salary, and a lot of amusing and chaotic challenges.

Yes, there were definitely worse things than working for SHIELD.

X

"Where are we going, again?" Jane asked. Director Fury had called then not ten minutes ago, warning them to pack a bag and be ready to go as soon as they could.

For Fury, that meant however long it took him to get to their lab. Fifteen minutes was the record, assuming he wasn't in transit at the time of the call, so Darcy and Jane were used to the rush. After their return from a rather sudden and suspiciously well-paid consulting trip hallway around the world, they thought it might be back to work as usual… and then they found out about New York.

It was obvious that there was something otherworldly about the destruction- come on, there were flying things and alien soldiers. SHIELD had to have a hand in somewhere, and probably more than just a hand judging by what little footage and reports they'd been able to scrounge up on the internet.

"Who knows?" Darcy shrugged, tossing the last few items in her duffel just as their doorbell buzzed. She opened the door hesitantly, leaving the chain on.

Because, yes, Darcy, a measly little chain is going to do so much against government agents trained to kill…

Standing at the door to their apartment was a woman with fiery red hair, and a man clad entirely in black with what looked like… was that a quiver on his back?

"Agent Natasha Romanov," the woman said, presumably by way of introduction, "and that's Agent Barton. Director Fury sent us."

"How do I know?"

She'd seen the footage. She knew exactly who they were, but Darcy was habitually overcautious ever since the incident with Thor. The man rolled his eyes and flashed credentials in her face. She slammed the door closed, unlatched the chain, and reopened it quickly. As much as she was still suspicious, it was probably a really bad idea to mess with two master assassins.

"Hello," she said, fumbling, "Um, can I get you some coffee or…? Jane's just, um, finishing up." The two agents followed Darcy inside and stood in the small kitchen, looking incredibly out of place in their full gear.

"We're not going to hurt you, you know." Natasha leaned against the kitchen counter, studying her carefully. "Your body language gives you away."

"Sorry," Dacry mumbled. "Being around people that I know could snap my neck with a flick of their wrist doesn't exactly make me feel safe."

"It should." Clint looked up from where he was fiddling with an arrow before tucking it back into his quiver. Jane cane bounding down the hall only a moment later, duffel in hand.

"Ok, ready when you-" She stopped abruptly at the sight of Clint and Natasha.

"Did Fury seriously send you guys out just to escort us?" Darcy asked, hoping to break the tension. It didn't work, but it was a valiant effort if she said so herself. Plus, she was actually really curious. Why send out the top assassins in the business just for a bodyguard job?

"Yep," Natasha replied, walking towards the door, "and we'd better get going. Plane's waiting."

"But why?" Darcy wasn't about to let this go. Natasha shrugged, her face unreadable.

"He must think you guys are worth it."

X

It took another six hours to reach the SHIELD base.

The entire facility was underground- literally. Way underground. As in, there was an elevator that went downwards for longer than Darcy was completely comfortable with, and the security was top notch. Her bag needed to be checked three times, and she wasn't very comfortable with exactly how thorough the search was.

Clint and Natasha left them at the second round of bag checks, and black clad security guards escorted them to their rooms. The place was pretty well-lit for being underground, and was basically a giant combination of floors, ramps, walkways, and a corridor system so complicated it would probably take a GPS to navigate properly.

Either that, or possibly use Theseus' ball of string trick…

The guard left her at the doorway to her room, which actually resembled a metal prison cell disguised as comfortable living quarters. The room was small, floor covered with carpet and metal walls painted over in a dull cream color. There was a twin size bed, a small metal table, a metal chair, and a metal door to a tiny bathroom on the left. This facility was clearly built for security, not for comfort.

The women were left alone for a grand total of about thirty seconds (long enough for Darcy to throw her bag on the floor and take in the room) before another agent came to escort her down to the "Tesseract Room," whatever that was. According to the agent walking her down, there would be some kind of briefing in about twenty minutes.

The Tesseract Room was the lowest point in the entire base, so far down the Darcy didn't even want to imagine it, because she would probably overestimate and visualize magma outside the walls. Apparently it was to keep whatever happened to reside down here safe, but in Darcy's mind it just put it in more danger- what happened if the base collapsed downward? Crush.

Darcy arrived before Jane (apparently someone else had the job of taking her down here), and was amazed at what she saw. Though the walls were still metal and made her feel like she was inside a glorified tin can, the area was cavernous, sloping upward in a strange kind of dome shape, but dark enough at the top that Darcy couldn't make out where it ended. There was a device that looked like something off of Stargate, and a blue, pulsating box hooked up to it with wires. Several people frantically monitored an impossible amount of computer screens.

As predicted, Director Fury was waiting on them when they arrived.

As no-so-predicted, so was Thor.

"Lady Darcy!" Thor smiled and lifted her into a bone-crushing hug that brought her feet off the ground. Fury was probably amused, but Darcy couldn't say for sure because it looked a lot more like a grimace. "Did you receive my messages?"

"Hey, big guy!" Darcy's greeting sounded strangled, and she gasped for breath as soon as she was safely back on the ground. "Yeah, we got 'em. I just hadn't gotten around to completely decoding them yet. Apparently things don't really translate across…uh… realms."

Now, where was that astrophysicist friend of hers? Darcy glanced around the room, but didn't see her… She had to be around somewhere. Ah! Jane's voice wafted towards her from around the corner. Eh, screw it, she thought, and called out to the general direction that she'd entered from.

"Jane- I think you have a visitor!"

Jane's head of blonde hair poked around the corner cautiously, and then came towards them at a full-out run when she took in the sight of Thor. Darcy backed out of the way as quickly as she could manage, smirking. At least she wouldn't have to hear Jane mope any more.

However, her attention was drawn to the man who came through with Thor. A man wearing green and black, chained and muzzled like a particularly dangerous wild animal. His gaze swept the room, his very being full of utter contempt. Darcy locked eyes with him for a brief moment, and she felt as though he saw through every inch of her, his eyes like ice and fire at once.

It was terrifying.

"That's Loki," Directory Fury said from beside her, noticing the direction of Darcy's gaze. Darcy jumped at the sound of his voice, but collected herself quickly. "In other words, the guy who nearly destroyed the world as we know it."

"That's Thor's brother?" Darcy breathed, almost too softly to hear, like a child afraid their parents might listen in on their conversation.

She got the feeling Loki would be able to hear what she said no matter where she was.

"Yes," Fury seemed surprised. "You've met him?"

"Nope, but he did almost decimate Puente Antiguo with a giant robot." It was amazing what things would come out of her mouth in a completely casual manner these days. "What's he doing here?"

Fury seemed to consider this a moment, casting a glance at the still-embracing Thor and Jane before turning back to Darcy.

"You'll find out."

X

Fury led them to a conference room somewhere on the same floor that they'd met Thor, and Darcy soon found herself face to face with five incredibly pissed off Avengers, one embarrassed-looking guy in a cape, and one still-muzzled, sulking Asgardian.

Hint: the sulking Asgardian wasn't Thor.

Fury ushered Darcy and Jane through the doors quickly, but they hadn't even shut before people were asking question.

"Is this the chick that caught lightning boy when he fell from the sky?" A voice cut through the silent room that could only belong to Tony Stark. Sure enough, the man himself stood from the table, gesturing to Jane.

"I wouldn't say caught…" Darcy mumbled. Jane elbowed her hard and Thor chuckled.

"Nice to meet you." Jane said, smiling as genuinely as she could.

Loki hummed from his chair, easily conveying impatience even though a muzzle. His hands (and feet, probably, though Darcy wouldn't see for sure) were chained to the arms of the chair and chained together. It didn't look like he was going anywhere.

Thor glanced at Fury, who nodded, and proceeded to remove Loki's muzzle.

"This is Jane Foster," Fury said quickly, covering Thor's actions. "She works for us in one of our more discreet locations, and she's the best authority we have on space travel."

"Who's she?" Bruce Banner, aka the Hulk, was looking directly at her. Darcy's throat went dry.

"The lab assistant who knows too much," she squeaked, but it was too quiet to hear.

Loki, however, seemed to hold back a laugh.

"She's my assistant, Darcy Lewis," Jane said confidently. "She was there when we, um…"

"Ran Thor over with a van?" Darcy suggested, rolling her eyes.

Dr. Banner couldn't hold back a laugh at that one. The rest of the room turned to look at him.

"Sorry," he said, directing his sentence at Thor, "Been there, done that. Worse than a van, though."

"As fascinating as that is, we're off topic," Fury sat at the head of the table and gestured for Jane and Darcy to take the empty seats across the table from Loki and Thor. They sat as quickly as possible, and Fury continued his explanation. "This meeting is to discuss Asgard's verdict determining the punishment of Loki for his crimes against Earth and Asgard. According to Thor, he has been entirely stripped of his powers and banished from Asgard until further notice."

"Ok, so if he can't be on Asgard then why is he here?" Clint asked.

"For the time being he's working for us."

The room erupted into noise.

There were shouts, whispers, screams of frustration, questions all over the place, and altogether a surprising amount of rage for only ten people. Well, actually six. Thor wasn't really shouting, Fury was attempting to contend with the shouting, Loki was watching the spectacle, and Darcy simply didn't know what to do.

But everyone else was certainly doing their part of shouting.

"QUIET!" Thor's voice cut through the clamor in a deafening roar, leaving silence in its wake. "Loki is my charge. He is to live as a mortal and repair the damage he has caused, and then he will return to Asgard for final judgment. If he passes, he will be freed."

"So that's it?" Clint asked. "That's his slap on the wrist? No powers and fix what you did? Do you know how many people lost their lives-"

"I am very well aware, Barton. I was there. My brother's punishment is lenient for now, but it will be… severe… if he fails at this task." Thor seemed mildly concerned about the exact severity of what might happen to his brother, adopted though he was. Even un-muzzled, Loki did not bother to comment, staring at the tabletop, so still that he might have been a statue.

"How severe?" Natasha leaned forward slightly as she spoke, elbows resting on the table. Thor licked his lips, as if thinking of exactly how to put it, but Darcy spoke before he could.

"Let me guess- something to do with being tied to a rock by his son's entrails while a venomous snake drips poison in his face, and he stays there till Ragnarok. Am I right?" She sank back in her chair, shrugging at the strange glances from around the table. Even Loki was looking at her curiously.

"What?" Darcy asked, slightly defensive. "If a guy who can control lightning falls out of the sky right in front of you and claims to be a Norse god, wouldn't you brush up on your reading?"

"Looks like you know your mythology, Miss Lewis." Dr. Banner said with an approving nod.

"She knows her history," Loki corrected, the slightest trace of a smile playing around the edges of his mouth. "Every myth-"

"Is taken from fact," Darcy finished. "I'm a college student; I've heard that phrase before." Thor cleared his throat, dispelling the strange kind of tension-non-tension building in the room.

"Regardless, Lady Darcy is correct in her assumption."

"So we've got to baby sit the psycho killer while he reforms, is that it?" Tony asked, obviously still annoyed.

"In a word, yes," Fury snapped. "And since you all fought him, you'll all be taking turns on guard duty, so you will all have a chance to speak for him or against him when it comes time for his judgment on Asgard."

"Including me and Jane?" Darcy asked, surprised.

"Yes, including you and Jane. In fact, Loki's first job is going to be helping you two work out the instabilities in the transport system so that we can get him safely home."

"The tesseract?" Loki asked. "You want me to help you build a transport based on the powers of the tesseract?"

"You brought it with you, right?" Fury didn't seem phased.

"Yes," Thor nodded. "One of your agents wired it to the machine in the lower chambers as soon as we arrived safely."

"And if I choose not to cooperate?" Loki's face was a mask, entirely unreadable. In mythology he was called Silvertongue, and Darcy was only just beginning to understand why.

Loki played a manipulation game. He used his words against people, made you fall into traps that you never intended to fall into and broke you down until he could mold you into something else with the same words that broke you.

"You'd best cooperate, brother," Thor warned.

This was going to be a long project. Darcy could feel it in her bones.

X

The next several days consisted of groans, sighs, complaints, and a slightly more than healthy dose of pure, unadulterated snark.

Jane and Darcy were provided a new lab adjacent to the area where the tesseract was hooked up to whatever wormhole transport system SHIELD had managed to MacGyver around the cube's energy, and Darcy spent her days pouring over numbers.

The more the days passed, the less needed Darcy felt. Everyone else she closely associated with was absolutely, without a question, completely indispensable. Tony, as annoying as he could get sometimes, was a weapons genius without any of Iron Man factored in, and his girlfriend was basically the brains behind his whole company. Natasha and Clint were probably more dangerous unarmed and completely naked than 90% of the world's population would be with a machine gun in their hands. Thor was Thor, and Jane was his genius girlfriend. Bruce and Steve… well, the big green science genius and the super soldier. 'Nuff said.

Anyone could decode numbers. Jane had a freaking legion of scientists at her beck and call if she really needed them, but the one thing that kept Darcy here? She knew too much. She knew too much, and she wasn't dangerous enough to kill, and just enough this side of competent to employ. Plus, Jane probably wouldn't be super willing to cooperate if they killed off her friend.

Or at least… she hoped Jane wouldn't be cooperative.

Darcy generally chose not to think about that.

According to what she heard from the others (namely from Bruce and Steve directly and from one loud, open complaint from Tony before Pepper could silence him), Loki refused to cooperate. He currently resided in a glass-walled cell somewhere inside the base, and each of the people who were meant to be escorting him around were now taking turns doing guard duty.

There were regular security guard shifts, of course, but every now and then someone else would sit in, presumably to converse or try to persuade him to cooperate… However, it really just seemed like Loki managed to press on the last nerve of every single person who had done their time- to the point that it was a general consensus that Bruce wouldn't even be going down there.

She couldn't understand what was so hard about cooperating- she understood why he wouldn't want to, but he seriously needed to. Darcy hadn't known him long, and she knew that Loki was nothing if not intelligent. He should be able to tell that the only way to evade certain… well, if not death, certain doom… was to cooperate with what SHIELD wanted, and if he could do it without pissing off the people who were likely going to decide his sentence when the time came, it was probably a good idea.

Her second week on the job Darcy started searching through the SHIELD database. Decoding the messages from Thor could only entertain her for so long, and the whole process was going nowhere fast as far as progress went. She needed a break… and possibly some snooping time. Most of the database was under heavy encryption, but there was some of it she was able to access without much trouble.

Loki's files were easy to access, not only providing information on Asgard and what little about him they knew, but detailing the damage to New York City and which SHIELD operatives had been compromised. Clint Barton topped the list, and right under it was a name she never expected to see.

Erik Selvig.

Compromised? How?

Darcy checked over her shoulder out of sheer habit. There was no one watching- the lab was empty except for Jane, and she was buried in her work, oblivious. Scanning through the page quickly, Darcy was able to gather that Erik had been subjected to some sort of mind control by the tesseract. By Loki.

According to the files, Erik was in recovery at a classified location, and expected to be released at some point in the near future. He was doing well physically… but not dealing with the fact that he built the machine to open the wormhole that let those things through into New York.

She could see why he wouldn't be. Erik was always one to blame himself for things.

A spark of anger bloomed in Darcy's chest. Before now she could deal with Loki passively, under the circumstances that even though he was dangerous, he had yet to earn any kind of personal score marker with her.

These files changed the game entirely.

X

Sometime in the near future Fury was going to lose his other eye, she was certain of it.

After talking to the Director earlier that day about Erik's status and the files on the SHIELD database, Darcy had been assigned guard duty for Loki on the next shift. Unfortunately, the next shift was the one that started at 3AM and continued into the hours of the day when the sun would actually be up if they were above ground to see it.

Ah, well. She supposed she would have to do it sometime, just like the rest of them, which was why she was sitting in an isolated section of the base at a desk at 4AM, staring at a glass cell with a single occupant who hadn't even deigned to move in the last hour she'd been there. He just sat on the floor, facing the back wall, still as stone.

Stone. Cold. Emotionless. A good fit, Darcy thought wryly.

Darcy sat in the chair at the security guard's desk, swinging her legs back and forth, while Loki continued to stare at the wall with his back to her. He knew she was there- she was sure of it- but he made no move to acknowledge her. With a sigh, she cranked up the volume on her iPod, hoping desperately that she wouldn't fall asleep anytime in the next four hours.

How did the regular security guards do this?

How did Loki do this?

And couldn't he just get out anytime he wanted? Even mortal, he probably had some tricks up his sleeve. What was the point in even having a security guard? To keep him company?

"I feel you staring, mortal."

Darcy nearly jumped out of her skin, removing her headphones and immediately glancing away. Loki chuckled softly.

"Interesting, that they would leave a helpless girl on guard…" Loki paused briefly, still facing away from her. "What do they think you can do against me?"

"Probably nothing," Darcy muttered before she could think better of it, rolling her eyes. It was probably best not to engage him in conversation…

And then Loki did something she wasn't expecting. He stood, turned around, and looked at her, eyebrows raised in surprise.

"What?" she asked, shrugging. "Didn't you already break out of this place once? You're supposed to be the god of mischief. I don't think you'd still be here the second you had a plan."

Loki blinked.

"Look, Mr. Silvertongue," Darcy sighed, "I may not be super scientist Jane, and I may not be a badass fighter like Natasha, and I definitely don't have the organizational skills of Pepper, but I'm not stupid."

"So you think you know who I am, do you?" He stood, walking towards her slowly, sizing her up like a predator preparing to pounce. A cold chill ran down her spine, and she fought to form coherent words.

"Not really… I know what somebody thought you were." If there's one thing she learned about history, it was that the winners make the records. Loki's opinion of himself was probably entirely different than any of the mythology books.

"And what would you say to that? Tell me I've been bad, that I need to be punished for my crimes like the rest of your world? Please. It's getting old."

"No," she shook her head slowly, sadly. "I'd tell you that whatever you were you aren't anymore. You're mortal, at least… according to Thor you're mortal. "

Loki laughed outright, harsh and loud, but it sounded forced. It was unnatural, the type of learned laugh that covers a sting or comes into being after living too long without a smile.

"Oh, that's where you're wrong. My body may be mortal, but I am so much more than human, and I know more about you than you would ever want me to see." He made it sound like human was equivalent to a disgusting disease.

"My father took me when I was a child from the world of our enemies; he raised me as his son. I was the less favored of his children… by everyone. Thor was always stronger, faster, the better warrior, the people's man… Most of them never turned my way, not with more than fright or contempt. Even Thor's friends never could stand me. Know your place, they said. You are not king." He paced back and forth in his cell as he talked, brooding.

"Small potatoes, huh?"

"Potatoes?" Loki's brow furrowed in confusion.

"Uh… local expression. Thing. It basically means not feeling good enough." She settled back into her chair, dropping her eyes and trying to look casual. Loki huffed in an almost amused fashion.

"What would you know about that?"

"More than you think," she muttered.

"Do tell," Loki stopped pacing, waiting expectantly.

"Mmmmm… nope. I'd really rather not." Darcy smiled innocently, enjoying the shocked expression on his face. She wasn't going to buy into his talk-to-me game, not until she got some information from him first.

"You're sure about that?"

"Quite."

Loki began pacing again for a few minutes, looking oddly like he was meditating. Darcy was about to go back to the comfort of her iPod for the next few hours until her replacement came, but she stopped when he spoke.

"Hmmm… Darcy Lewis, twenty-one years old, grew up with your mother, father, grandmother, and three sisters all living in one house. And a cat. Went to the University of New Mexico, still lacking a semester in your degree, worked three jobs the past few months before SHIELD signed you on." Loki waited, as if expecting her to react.

"Ok." Darcy blinked, unimpressed.

"It doesn't frighten you at all?"

"You could probably find out all of that from my facebook page," she said with a shrug. She was pretty sure people she knew less than Loki had seen that page. "Or possibly a particularly good fortune teller. They're just numbers and timelines- it's nothing."

"Then what is something?" He had yet to lean against the wall or even shift his weight. He just stood, talking. It was a bit eerie, to tell the truth.

"Why should I tell you?"

"You don't often have the chance to talk to a god." Loki shrugged, as if that was reason enough.

It was 4AM.

Darcy was tired.

She didn't want to be here, especially after what she found out about Erik and the mind control (and who knows how many other people who were under the same influence), and she was pretty sure Loki wanted her here even less. Over the past few days she had seen uncontrollable amounts of sass, snark, and utter disrespect towards everyone in the entire facility, and they would generally just sit there and take it because they knew Fury would jump on them for "harming the prisoner." And Loki knew it, too. Some of it was funny, but most of it… most of it had piled and piled to beyond the point of tolerance for Darcy.

Someone needed to teach the guy a lesson about what was actually happening around here, and they needed to do it soon, before he lost his head (or life) or anyone else lost their minds.

And he was in a cell, and she was out here.

And he was listening to her now.

"Oh, don't even try that!" Darcy nearly yawned, but caught herself at the last second. She stood, marching towards the glass cell. "Don't think you can trick me into your mind games with your pretty words. You might have been a god to some people at some point, but not to me. I don't believe in gods, and even if I did… well, you've been stripped of your power."

She could practically feel Loki's tension, his blue eyes sharp and cold. It was likely a very, very bad idea to piss him off, but just now she wasn't worried about that. She was sick and tired of him acting like a princess when they were doing something for him.

"You listen, and you listen well, because if I'm going to be around you for the forseeable future, I'm not going to take your shit." Darcy took a deep breath, willing her anger into a coherent speech pattern. "I've felt like small potatoes before… hell, I still feel like small potatoes. I come to work every day surrounded by people who are crazy smart and strong and frankly a lot more useful than I am. I know some computer programming and I have some common sense, but it's nothing they don't already have covered here. Don't tell me I don't get small potatoes. Ilive small potatoes."

"Just because you've been mistreated, or wronged, or whatever, doesn't give you the right to go and seek revenge on everything and everyone in your path just because you can. Do you know what that makes you, Loki? It doesn't make you strong, or powerful, or even right. It makes you just like them."

"Do you have any idea what SHIELD is doing for you- what your brother is doing for you? Any idea at all? Because I can guarantee that most of the people in this building don't want to give you a second chance at all."

"He's not my brother!" Loki snapped, façade finally falling. "He never was! He never saw me as a brother, as an equal!"

"He's the only reason they haven't shot you yet," she said frankly, coldly. And it was true- he had to know that, somewhere deep down. He had to realize that Thor was the only thing keeping his smug little ass alive. Loki set his jaw, still staring.

"Do you really want to know the reason why you're in this cell?" Darcy asked, voice low and menacing. "Because it isn't to keep the rest of the base safe. It's to keep Clint, or Natasha, or Tony, or any one of the hundreds of other people you've pissed off just inside this building from putting a bullet through your fragile little mortal heart while you sleep." Darcy's nose was mere inches from the glass, so close that under normal circumstances he would have been able to feel her breath.

Loki didn't speak. He didn't move. If she didn't know better she'd say he wasn't breathing, either, but that just wasn't possible. Just like a statue, blue eyes cold and unfeeling.

"Tell me what you did to Erik."

"Oh, is that all?" Loki almost smiled. "You want to know what happened to your friend?"

"Is that a crime?"

"Depends," he shrugged, "but if you really want to know, I'll freely admit that I never harmed him. The knowledge from the tesseract is a gift. It shows you a higher plan, a higher purpose… it just so happened that I was the master of it at the time." There was no telling if she should believe him or not at this point.

"Is it permanent?" Darcy asked, crossing her arms.

"No, stupid girl." He rolled his eyes. "But I'm sure he remembers what happened. The tesseract has some effect on everything it touches- even me… even you."

"I've never-" Darcy began, but Loki held up a hand.

"You work within mere feet of it every day. Sooner or later you will start to see its effects…" He eyed her curiously, as if sizing her up. Darcy fought not to squirm under the scrutiny. "I pity the day when that happens. You will likely not enjoy it."

Her heart was pounding so hard and fast that it seemed to shake her entire body.

"Enjoy your stay, Loki. At the rate you're going, it won't be long."

She turned away from the glass, planted herself in the guard's chair, and didn't move until the next guard came to switch the shift.

X

Darcy left several hours later- he wasn't sure when, but they hadn't spoken since she sat back down in the guard's chair.

No one else had responded to his taunts in the same way she had. They had either played into his game, like Rodgers, or refused to respond, like Barton, or exchanged meaningless barbs back and forth until one of the agents watching the video feed had come to the conclusion that one of them was probably going to break the glass and strangle the other at some point. Stark was always an interesting one, but Darcy…

Insolence. Absolutely appalling! He had (or used to have) more power in his little finger than she had in her entire body, and there she was trying to tell him that she knew things he did not. It was impossible- he had the knowledge of ages!

And yet he constantly questioned what may have happened to his mind in more recent times. The taunting, the teasing that followed him his whole life, always second to Thor, second to everyone… the revelation of his true heritage, the fall off the bifrost…

He hated it. He hated hearing someone else use their tongue like a well-sharpened knife to slice away at the very heart of another until there was nothing else left to see or cut away. He knew that trick well, and Loki was not one to share his secrets. He hated that she wouldn't respond to his tricks, and he hated that she knew enough of the tales of old to be wary of his every move in ways that even the Avengers couldn't know about.

He hated that she exposed him, called him out on his façade and his behavior inside the base.

But most of all, he hated that every word she said had been true, because it made him hate himself. He still doubted his brother's true feelings towards him after everything that had passed between them, but he didn't doubt that Thor was truly the only reason he was still alive.

He could see the truth of her story in her eyes- the use of that strange expression about potatoes did nothing to dampen the fire in her words- and remembered the words of the agent who first found him when he broke out of his glass prison the last time.

You lack conviction.

Darcy Lewis most definitely did not lack conviction.

She believed every word she said and didn't mind telling even someone who would potentially have the power to end her.

They rang over and over in his mind, those words.

Put a bullet through your fragile little mortal heart while you sleep…

I live small potatoes…

It makes you just like them…

He cringed at the memory of the last. Partly because it hurt to think about the people who had done this to him- had teased him and knocked him down, had slowly turned him into the monster of Asgard… but mostly because he knew, somewhere, that it had to be true.

Loki thought of himself as intelligent. He wasn't completely devoid of logic, and he liked the thought that he understood how the mind worked- the games it played, the paths it took.

Darcy had taken the resolve he had left and effectively put a hammer to it, dampening if not destroying it, and she had done it without a thought for her own safety, in defense of the others… and ultimately in defense of Loki. She didn't want to see him dead, she said so herself, but she wasn't about to put up with him if she didn't have to, either.

Interesting, that she would do that.

And, much to his dismay, he liked it.

Well, perhaps like was too strong a word. Intrigued, maybe. Curious.

A mortal with fire. And not the kind of hidden fire that flared in Agents Barton or Romanov, or the open, charismatic flame that flickered around Stark and his kind. This was pure, raw, untamed emotion, and it was as addicting as a drug to him. His goals had become twisted over time, still retaining integrity in his eyes but not, apparently, in the eyes of others.

Oh, yes, he liked Darcy- if only for the time being, if only for her spunk and bravery and complete irrationality... but he liked her.

If only a tiny bit.

X

Darcy was fuming when she came to the lab the next morning, a cup of strong coffee and translation notebook in hand. She hadn't found time for a nap, and cranky Darcy was never good for anyone.

"How was guard duty?" Jane asked, still staring at her computer screen. When she finally looked up a few seconds later, Darcy was glaring. "That good, huh?"

"Swell," she snapped, plopping down with her notebook and praying the caffeine would do something to combat the exhaustion.

"Darcy, why don't you take the day off?" Jane suggested, turning to look at her. She seemed genuinely concerned. "You look pretty rough."

"I'll be fine," Darcy waved her off as nonchalantly as she could. "College student, remember? I've pulled all-nighters before."

"It might be good to just take a day to res, though. Maybe just-"

Jane tensed, cutting off as the door opened. Thor stepped inside, bright smile on his face, and for a moment Darcy was incredibly confused… until she saw who was in tow behind him.

"Oh, no," she groaned, rubbing her eyes. "Tell me I'm dreaming. Tell me I fell asleep and this is my nightmare."

"Nope," Jane squeaked.

"Loki has decided to cooperate. He starts today," Thor explained. Loki said nothing, taking a seat on one of the stools around the lab. His hands were in cuffs, but not chained, and the cuffs had blinking lights on the side (she later learned that they were for tracking, and worked a bit like a shock collar if Loki tried to leave the base).

"Don't worry, mortal," Loki sighed, "The cameras are on me every second. I'm not going to kill you while you sleep." Darcy felt an involuntary bust of fear and rage hearing him use her words.

"You know, if you weren't constantly using the word 'moral' like it's an unholy disease I might actually believe you." She waited, staring, daring him to break eye contact first. The tension in the air was palpable, and Darcy could see Thor becoming twitchy out of the corner of her eye. Loki tilted his head slightly, as if considering.

"Darcy," he said, still not breaking eye contact.

It was soft, the first non-threatening sound she thought she'd ever heard from him. He wasn't playing her this time, wasn't teasing, wasn't working on a game. At least, she didn't think he was.

Darcy nodded once and turned back to her notebook.

X

As soon as Darcy effectively left their conversation Thor let out an audible sigh of relief, and Jane began babbling about the progress she'd made and the problems they still had. She asked questions about what the bifrost was, how it worked, and how long it had been in existence, and Loki told her only small amounts of information at a time. The process of slowly relaying information and calculations to Jane lasted several days- she worked like a woman possessed, taking on a strange kind of drive that he had yet to see in any normal human being.

Then again, he was inside SHIELD. Normal was relative here.

Day after day, "new" information about the bifrost (new to them, at least, as much of it was commonly known on Asgard), the tesseract, and the general act of transportation across realms would occupy Jane, and Darcy still worked at her numbers, occasionally listening in when she didn't think he noticed.

He always noticed.

Loki knew quite a bit about the bifrost, truthfully. He'd been fascinated with it as a child- it was how he was able to figure out the basic elements of how to open the portal over New York.

The rest of it had been given to him by the tesseract.

The more he thought, the more he wondered what the tesseract truly did to those it gave intelligence and purpose to. Knowledge from the tesseract had long been considered a gift in every culture he knew, but sometimes, on rare occasions, someone would go mad from the pressure of their newfound gift.

Loki occasionally wondered if going mad would have been a relief. At least then he would be able to claim he had no responsibility for his actions, perhaps get off a little easier.

He couldn't say that, though. He knew exactly what he was doing the entire time, he knew what his goals were, and in reaching for his goals he allowed nothing to stand in his way. Looking back, though… it was disturbing. In his mind's eye, Loki could see the versions of Darcy, Jane, and Erik that had met Thor when he first fell from the sky.

Jane was nearly unchanged. A little thinner, perhaps, a little more tired, and quite a bit more in love, but those changes were nearly imperceptible under a cursory glance.

He had only seen Erik once since the tesseract had loosened its grasp on him, just after the Avengers took him into captivity. The scientist had looked at him with cold, angry eyes, unwilling to forget or forgive.

Darcy… she had changed completely.

Loki could remember thinking her a frivolous creature, but he could have been wrong. In only a brief time in the lab with her and occasionally seeing her at meals, he had quickly come to a different conclusion.

She sat quietly in the lab, preferring to work alone with "headphones" in her ears (according to Jane she was "drowning out the world," and Thor clarified that she was listening to music). She was a calming voice when things became too out-of-hand between Stark and Rodgers, once very pointedly telling them to go find another play spot or she would put them both into time out, which Stark's girlfriend found incredibly amusing. She made strange references to different aspects of Midgardian culture that most of the others seemed to find funny, and she was the only person in the whole base that could convince Jane to stop working long enough to eat a proper meal or even sleep.

Everyone at this base had blood on their hands in some way or another. Liars and killers, the lot of them, all of them carrying secrets and stories that no one else should know, and maybe that was what made Darcy and Jane seem to out of place.

They weren't the same as the rest of them- they had their own lives, their own stories, but they weren't riddled with blood and tragedy in the same way that the rest of them were. They didn't carry themselves in the same way as the others, an invisible weight dragging them down with every step, far too tired for their age. They hid in their corners, away from the rest- Jane in her work, Darcy inside herself, in her verbal barbs and jokes that kept the rest of her shielded.

In a way, he understood what his brother saw in Jane. She was pretty, certainly, and brilliant, a good conversationalist, but time and time again she failed to show the kind of depth Loki expected of her. She liked to learn things, and question, but her mind was solely on science and the stars… and Thor, which was just a bit too strange for him to ever consider making a friend of her.

Sometimes it seemed like Darcy hated him, probably because of what he did to her other scientist friend, the one who had worked with the tesseract. Other times her guard would slip- she would laugh at one of his quips, or let her guard down for just a moment, and it was like she'd forgotten who he was and what he'd done. She was a puzzle, a jumble of conflicted emotions, and it was entirely too fascinating to watch.

Loki almost wished he had more time to watch her, but he wasn't here to become involved in the lives of Midgardians. He was here to take his punishment, and when the time came he would return to Asgard and forget these petty people.

Especially the mouthy lab assistant.

X

Loki was there some days, and other days he was nowhere to be found. On those days, she could only assume that it was another Avenger's job to babysit for a time.

However, where Loki was, so was Thor, and that meant that most days Loki was at the lab because Thor was at the lab because Jane was at the lab. And Darcy just sat in the corner and did her numbers and tried to come up with a reliable system for decoding the messages that Thor had originally sent.

She usually tried to ignore Loki's presence, but it was never impossible to entirely forget he was there. He had the unusual quality that made you feel his stares, and it creeped her out to a point where she moved into the least visible corner of the room to do work that didn't involve a computer.

The more Loki looked, the more Darcy felt that it was her right to look back. And oh, he looked. Not in a perverted way, but like he was… interested in her, somehow. Curious. Like she was an anomaly and he was dying to find out why. She never understood what was so intriguing to him. As far as Darcy was concerned she was the most normal person on the base.

And as Darcy looked back at him, the more confused she was about what she saw.

Loki had an air of arrogance around other people that was hard to take, but sometimes, when she saw him alone, she saw how his posture changed, saw the tired look in his eyes. She saw the slight little glances he cast the others when they talked in groups, and the clear jealousy when he saw Thor with Jane.

Darcy wondered for a while if Loki had a thing for Jane- he seemed to have mostly gotten over his direct, open jealousy over his brother, and it made sense. Everyone had a thing for Jane at some point or another; she was just that kind of person. However, when Loki and Jane worked together without Thor (not often, but it happened whenever Thor's presence just became too…erm… distracting for Jane) he seemed his usual cold and distant self.

So maybe it wasn't that he had a thing for Jane- it was that he wanted what his brother had with her.

It was sad, really. That's all it was, just sad.

Darcy, for her part, could never forget what he'd done. She'd seen the city when they arrived- it was in shambles, and there were people hurt, sick, and dying. Lives were torn apart, and no one would ever be the same again… and it was all Loki's fault.

And it made her sick to think about because she knew that, somewhere deep inside her, she had started to try and look past that.

Assuming, of course, that it was even possible to do so.

X

It was hot.

It was hot, and Darcy couldn't sleep if her life depended on it. The sheets stuck to her back and neck, and she couldn't find a comfortable position among the pillows and blankets.

Even the metal walls were room temperature, which was saying something, because on a normal day they would feel like ice against her skin. She'd tried everything she could think of before deciding that sleep was useless, and decided instead to slip on some old sweatpants and take a walk. Fury had said they had free reign of the building, and she intended to use it.

Darcy had a pretty good handle on how the corridors lined the base by now, but she thought that the safest route to take would probably be the one that wound around by the tesseract room (or tesseract cavern, as she'd mentally nicknamed it). It was so familiar that she could walk it without much thought.

The air outside her room was blessedly cool (apparently SHIELD had no use for things like thermostats), creating goosebumps on her overheated skin. She walked along the paths on the upper floor towards the cavern, so high up that it was darker than most of the lower floors simply because hardly anyone ever came up this high, feeling better and more awake with every step. For the first time in a long time, her mind felt clear.

It was wonderful.

And it lasted about six and a half minutes.

"What on earth are you doing prowling the base in the middle of the night?" Darcy stopped dead at the sound of Loki's voice. She would normally have run away or tased him, but she didn't have her taser and he'd be able to catch her in a second, so… there wasn't much of a point. Plus, there were guards all over the place. Sooner or later one of them would come along.

Probably.

"I could ask you the same thing." Darcy looked around to try to find him, squinting through the darkness. Eventually she saw a tall form standing on the walkway that stretched above the area where the tesseract was like a catwalk in a theater. Gotcha.

He was staring out into the space past the railway, looking like he was somewhere far, far away, caught up in his own thoughts. Darcy walked over to him slowly as he finally spoke.

"I cannot sleep. I dislike being unable to see the sky." Loki continued to stare into the darkness that spread out from the walkway.

"Me too," Darcy admitted, leaning against the railing beside where he stood. For a moment, she thought she saw surprise on his face, but it was gone in a flash, back to the cool mask of impassivity he always wore. "The sky, I mean. Living in New Mexico… you don't exactly stay underground much. Especially working with an astrophysicist for a living. Sometimes I still think about it before I sleep- name off the constellations."

"I suppose you have your own legends here."

"About the stars?" Darcy looked out into the blackness beyond the railing, where the room was too large to be completely filled with light, imagining familiar patters in the constellations. "Some of them, yeah…"

"I've seen some of you friend's star charts. You name them differently than your ancestors, as well."

"Really?" Darcy had been told star stories all her life. She wasn't brilliant at astronomy, but she knew the basics. "Like what?"

"The one your people call Hyades- it was known before as Ulf's Keptr."

"Translation?" Darcy raised an eyebrow, confused. Hyades- the face of Taurus, the bull, but she had no idea what on earth "Ulf's Keptr" meant. Loki laughed softly, the tiniest of smiles appearing and disappearing before she could completely register it.

"It means Mouth of the Wolf."

"Like the wolves that chased the sun and the moon?" Darcy asked absentmindedly. He didn't respond for a moment, thinking or stunned or possibly something else entirely, but she could feel his eyes on her, waiting for her to continue or move, or maybe just taking her in.

"You know more than you let others see."

Darcy shrugged. She liked knowing things… it was just that the things she liked knowing didn't usually fall in line with her field of work. Science wasn't her forte, at least not the kind of science that Jane worked with, but she liked stories. A good story was the heart of all humanity, right? The whole world is made up of stories, and the more you listen to them, the more you know.

"Maybe I don't want people to see."

"Why not?"

"You should talk," Darcy said pointedly. Loki slumped slightly, seeming to concede to her point.

"We have an expression in Asgard: 'Every problem has nine sides and infinite solutions.'"

"Why nine?" She raised her eyebrows in question.

"Nine realms, nine branches of the Yggdrasil," he explained, but then seemed to reconsider. "Some say it's because of the number of people in the first ruling family on Asgard, but my research indicates that there were six of them… Unless there are three cats somewhere that I never knew about."

Darcy laughed, surprised at the joke, and was happy to find that Loki was smiling as well. God, he looked so… normal when he smiled. Handsome, even, though she had to allow that it was pretty dark right now.

"I really don't want to like you," Darcy mumbled before she could stop herself. She cursed under her breath as soon as she realized what had happened. He looked like he'd been slapped. "Oh, god, that sounded awful, didn't it? It's just I expected you to be awful, and you're really not all that bad when you're not out for blood and watching as New York crumbles around you…"

"Nine sides," he said, all the humor gone.

"What was your side?"

"Maybe someday I'll tell you."

Darcy could see why he might have come here, wishing for the sky. This was the only place in the entire base that ever had any real darkness- the rest of it was always lit, expect for the small rooms… but even they felt small. This was huge, open space, where your voice bounced off the walls if you talked just a bit too loud, and if you stared long enough, and your imagination as good enough, you could just imagine that you might be outside. You could just imagine that this was night, and it was the sky, and if you looked hard enough or imagined well enough, you just might see the stars.

"Why can't you be like this all the time?" she asked softly.

"Like what?"

"This!" she gestured vaguely, waving her hands in the air. "Without the smoke and mirrors and words to hide behind. You're, like, the complete opposite of what you are now when you're around other people."

"I give them what they expect to see." He shrugged, like it was completely normal.

Hell, he was a prince on Asgard, right? Giving people what they expected to see was probably just life for him, as natural as breathing.

"How am I supposed to know which one to believe?" She shuffled her weight a little, shifting against the railing, hoping she hadn't gone just a step too far.

"Which one do you want to believe?"

Darcy thought for a long time- probably too long, in hindsight. She wanted to believe that Loki was a better person. She wanted to believe the best in him, but he insisted on proving her wrong every day. Ever glare, every sharp word, every hasty action taken in anger… it made her resolve to find the best in him crumble. At times like this, though, she thought she saw a spark of something- something… human, as ill-fitting as the word probably was. Something… not quite good, but not quite bad. Morality, perhaps, a sense of self, of who he was before all of this.

She wanted to believe in that morality very, very badly… but that could be a dangerous thing for all involved.

"Whichever one is the real one."

"Interesting," he mused, turning back to the darkness.

"What?"

"You constantly think about the best in other people, and yet you don't say you want to believe the best in me."

"You're twisting my words, Silvertongue." Darcy swatted his arm lightly, playfully. The mood lightened, but only for an instant. "I want to know who you are- good or bad. That's all." She turned her head slightly to look up at him, finding that he was staring at her.

"That's more than you think." His voice was soft, almost… small. It sounded strange to her ears to hear Loki seem small, but the change was nice. More of him, and a tiny bit less of what people expected him to be.

"I'm ok with that. For now." She stood up straight again, biting her lip. "Look, whether we like it or not, we have to work together. And I know we're not on the best of terms- actually, we're not on the worst of terms, either. What are we even doing-"

"Darcy," Loki said quickly, cutting her off. She was glad it was dark- babbling generally meant blushing, and she wasn't about to be caught blushing around Loki, of all people.

"Right. The point is… truce?" She held out her hand gingerly.

"Truce," Loki said after a short moment, shaking her hand. His grip was strong and his skin felt like fire against her hand it was so warm. "You're cold."

Darcy let go of his hand immediately, wrapping her arms around herself.

"Yeah, it's kind of a constant thing," she said with a shrug. "You know what they say- cold hands, warm heart. Um… 'night Loki."

The phrase had tumbled out of her mouth before she had a chance to stop it. One of the things her mother used to say… Darcy scuttled off towards her room as quickly as she could, a strange sort of knot taking root in her chest.

This couldn't be a good thing.

* * *

Notes: At this point I have no idea if I'm going to continue this or not. It honestly depends on reader response- I probably could continue without much trouble from the muse, but it's not BURNING to continue, you know?


	2. Chapter 2

_Nowhere_. That's where this was going- nowhere, and _fast_.

These translation papers were probably among the top contenders for "Most Convoluted Pile of Scribbled Mess in the Known Universe," and she was so tired of them. Jane really just didn't have much for her to do, and it wasn't like it was Jane's fault, not really. She had Loki to help her with the tesseract-based transport system and Thor to hang around with the rest of the time.

In short, these translations were starting to take over her life in a way she didn't like.

And frankly… Darcy was kind of lonely.

It wasn't that people weren't friendly to her, or that she didn't have anything to do. She'd combed the SHIELD database for all it was worth, looking for information that people might not have felt comfortable telling her (to the point where Darcy was even beginning to debate cracking the encryption on the higher security level files… but she quickly decided that would be a very bad idea). Some days she ran errands for Bruce in his lab, when he needed someone he knew wouldn't botch the job and she was fed up with translations. Some days she talked to Steve, or had massively fun snark battles with Tony (which usually ended in either 'touché' or Pepper breaking them up), and Natasha was even teaching her a few self-defense tactics…

But even though she wasn't alone, she still felt kind of lonely.

Darcy had never had a lot of friends because she'd never had time for a lot of friends. Between school and trying to pay her rent, she was lucky to have enough time to think before Thor came…

And then after Thor came she'd had a decent salary, a nice place to stay, and time for friends. The only problem was how to go back to a normal life with normal people doing normal things after that one weekend. There were other things out there, and she couldn't really talk about them to anyone but Jane and Erik. On the bright side, she and Jane had grown closer very fast. On the downside, if people thought Darcy was weird before, they certainly avoided her now- just knowing that she was close to that incident made people cringe, even without comments about the six foot tall Norse thunder god that her roommate was dating.

So now she was here, in an underground bunker chock full of people that she could talk to about any of that- people who thought things like this were normal- and she still felt like a freak. Maybe she was just too stuck in the middle? There was stone cold practical, and there was worldly and frivolous. Darcy liked to think she was somewhere in between, and somewhere in between that was SHIELD and the rest of the world. She balanced on a weird kind of invisible tightrope, teetering _just_ _enough_ to stay the strange one at either extreme, and it was starting to gnaw at her.

The only thing worse was that a few nights ago with Loki was the first time she didn't feel so strange.

It was good to be able to talk and not feel like an idiot for not knowing things, and he didn't know enough about Earth to judge anything that she said like other people might have. Sure, he was a smart-assed bastard most of the time, but… honestly, she was kind of warming up to him.

There was even a horrible feeling that she might be getting attached to him.

He sat beside Jane, talking numbers and calculations, while Darcy stole glances at him from her desk, trying to think of a way to get his story out. Loki was like a puzzle a million miles wide, and the pieces falling into place were as small as her fingernail. It was intriguing, and in a way she hated herself for giving in.

_Loki is evil. Evil, Darcy_. That had been her mantra for the past several days… _weeks_, even. He killed people, ruined lives, destroyed so much and for what reason? Anger? Revenge? No one really knew, it seemed… and she could never forgive him for what he did, regardless of the reasons behind it.

But sometimes she would catch herself wondering.

At his best, he was incredibly intelligent, collected, witty, and could even occasionally seem charming. At his worst, he was bitter and cold, given to horrible bursts of a bad temper and isolating himself completely. It was sort of… _intriguing_, in a weird way? She caught glimpses of someone almost human underneath the mask of cold reason and revenge that Loki kept close to him at all times, and all it did was make her wonder what had happened to change him into this- this being of ice and bitterness.

She didn't think that the former god of mischief, who found the occasional pranks she and Tony pulled amusing, who liked to read and liked the stars, and who seemed just as unsure of himself as Darcy was of herself, could have always been like this. When he smiled (rarely), he smiled as though the expression was unfamiliar; as if it had been so long that he wasn't sure how to smile any more.

_No making friends with the bad guy, Darcy._

_But isn't he supposed to be reforming?_

_And… what if he wants someone else to talk to as badly as I do?_

Distraught and altogether not ready to handle the flood of emotions, Darcy put her head down on the desk, locking her fingers at the base of her neck. There was a clattering sound from the jostled jars of pencils and paperclips.

"What _are_ you doing?" Loki called. She could almost hear the ghost of a laugh in his voice.

Darcy mumbled a few curses under her breath before she raised her head.

"Nothing," she muttered, shaking her head.

"You ok?" Jane asked, blinking. True, Darcy was usually the easygoing, slightly apathetic member of the group- she was the one who _de-stressed_ everyone, not the one who pulled her hair out over things!

"Fine," Darcy said, nodding. "I'm fine." She was simply trying to convince everyone that she would be perfectly ok after the migraine incident of two days ago. Most of them had started to believe her… she thought.

"Well… Thor and I were going to go get some lunch- do you want anything?" She sounded unconvinced, but that was just Jane. She almost never believed anything but what she saw with her own eyes, and Darcy was positive she didn't make a convincing case.

"Um… could you just get me some coffee?" Darcy rubbed her eyes. Maybe some caffeine intake would be a good thing for her.

"Sure," Jane nodded, obviously still concerned, and walked out the door, stealing a glance back over her shoulder as she left. As soon as the door was closed, Loki stood and walked over to her.

"Why did you lie?" The question was blunt, and Darcy was both surprised and grateful. She wasn't up for any of his mind games right now.

"I didn't-"

"I'm the god of lies, Darcy. Or, I was," he amended. "Don't try to fool me."

_Smart, Darcy. Real smart. Lie to the liar so big the Vikings made him the god of it._

"I just… I don't want her to worry. I do actually care about her, and Jane just worries about everything. I'm a big girl. I can take care of myself."

"You're sure of that?" Without warning, Loki seized her chin, holding her face so she was forced to look up at him, the other hand grabbing for her right wrist. He looked her over with the scrutiny of a doctor, and Darcy realized he was checking her pulse with the hand on her wrist.

_Oh. That makes sense now_.

"You haven't been sleeping well, have you?"

"Not for a long time," Darcy said softly. No need to worry about her sleeping habits- they had never been good. She gently worked her arm free of his grasp and he let his other hand drop. "It's just been a little hot in my room lately, so I've been sleeping even worse than usual."

"I've heard a few of the others complaining as well," Loki said thoughtfully.

"You haven't noticed?" Funny- did it only affect part of the base?

"My… _heritage_ typically renders me immune to temperature extremes." He winced, as if mentioning his background was like dancing on pins and needles.

"Are all Asgardians like that?" she asked, curious. Loki paused, shaking his head.

"I am not of Asgard."

"I thought you were Thor's brother-" she began, but he quickly cut her off.

"I am adopted."

Adopted? Adopted from _where_? Asgard was far out enough- were there other places even freakier than the home world of half the legends she'd ever read?

"The prince of Asgard was adopted? Sounds like a story." She toyed with a pen, waiting for a response. He knew what she was talking about- his side of the story- there was no way he _couldn't_ know. Even on the verge of an aspirin high and feeling like Thor had pounded his hammer into her head, she'd be interested to hear it.

"I will tell you when you tell me why it is you want to know."

"Because I'm interested in why you haven't bothered to even make a case for yourself yet," Darcy said frankly.

"I was not born of Asgard. Odin raised me as his son, but I was born on Jotunheim…"

Loki proceeded to tell her about Asgard's war with Jotunheim, how his father found him in a temple and brought him back to raise as his own. Somehow he managed to come off as a third part, like someone witnessing it all through a window or on a TV screen with no actual attachment to the story. Only the bare minimum of details… The only conclusion that Darcy could draw from this was that Loki had been seriously affected by his history and was using his disconnected manner as a shield. It didn't sound like an altogether terrible situation… until she picked up on the fact that he hadn't been told about his birth parents until too late.

"My dad's adopted," she blurted. Loki raised an eyebrow, obviously wondering where this was going. "His whole life they just sort of… told him. It was never any secret. He said… he said he didn't care who had birthed him. The people who raised him were his real family." She paused, waiting to see if Loki would respond to her sentiment. He simply stared.

"How did you find out?" she asked. Loki huffed, pushing up his left shirt sleeve so that she could see his lower arm.

It slowly turned blue to the elbow.

_Blue_.

"Jotuns look like this," he said softly. Darcy looked up for a moment- he was avoiding her eyes. He looked strange, softer somehow. _Vulnerable_. Yes, that was it. Loki, one of the two most powerful being she'd ever met, looked vulnerable, and it was unsettling. She reached out and held his hand with both of her own before she could talk herself out of it. Loki jumped at the contact, eyes darting back up to her face.

"Magic?" she asked, unable to say anything else that might be coherent.

"Changing appearance is so natural to me that it is a fact of my biology. No magic involved. Now… feel free to run as the others would," he said bitterly. His hand slowly faded back to his usual skin color, though Darcy didn't let go.

"Why would I run?" she asked.

"I am a Frost Giant-" Loki said, as if it was obvious, but she cut him off.

"And I've never heard of that until today," Darcy snapped. "If I planned on running, I would have been long gone as soon as they mentioned you're the guy who almost destroyed New York and tried to take over the world. That carries a lot more weight with me than your skin turning blue."

Loki didn't move, didn't make a sound. He stared at her with his bright blue eyes, confused or wary or entirely unsure what to do. She didn't know what else to say that could make what she felt more clear- blue was nothing. Murder? Now _that_ carried weight.

"It all seems kind of… I don't know… racist," she said, thinking out loud more than anything. It really did, though. It was like trying to tell someone who had lived in the US for 40 years that they weren't an American just because the happened to be born somewhere else.

"How so?" Loki asked. When she looked up from his hand he was staring at her. She wondered briefly how familiar with the concept of "racist" Asgardians were, or if he'd even heard the term before.

"Well, you were raised on Asgard, right?" Darcy asked. He nodded in confirmation. "And you act Asgardian, and for most of your life you acted in the best interest of Asgard. You know what they say- if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck…" She shrugged.

"What?" Loki shook his head, incredulous. His reaction to different expressions was usually comical- Darcy used them habitually and without thinking that he might not be familiar.

"Never mind," she said, sighing. "The point is… why would you think people would judge you for anything other than what you proved yourself to be?"

"A… duck?"

"Or a Frost Giant." She looked down at their hands once more. Strange, that his skin was always warmer than hers… "Cold hands, warm heart, remember?"

As much as the phrase really didn't seem to fit the person who tried to take over the world, it seemed to offer him a little comfort. His expression shifted slightly, blank and disbelieving.

"I do not think the others would agree," he said, gently moving his hand away.

"You really want to live?" Darcy asked, making direct eye contact. He didn't need to answer- she had no doubt that chained until Ragnarok was not a pleasant option for him. "Prove them wrong."

He looked as if he was about to respond, but just then the door to the lab opened.

Jane and Thor were back from lunch, bearing three sandwiches, sodas, and one large mocha for Darcy. Loki went back to his work and proceeded to ignore her.

She'd continue this interrogation another day.

The next few days she wasn't in Jane's lab very often, mostly assisting Tony and Bruce with some direct studies of the tesseract in relation to Loki's scepter. She ran errands all over the place, looking for this component or that, and easily reprogrammed one of the SHIELD computers to run a specific diagnostic on the scepter.

Not that Tony or Bruce couldn't have done either of those, but this way she had something to do that didn't irritate her to death and they didn't have to leave their lab for fear the job would be done incompetently. Even Tony had been impressed when she reprogrammed the system- _didn't know you had it in you_, he'd said. A lot of people found him kind of annoying, but Darcy thought Stark was a pretty nice guy when you were around him long enough to see it.

_Maybe that applies to other people…_

No. _No_.

_Loki is not a teddy bear or a wounded puppy. He has murdered people, he tried to take over earth, and no matter how docile he seems to be, he's still dangerous._ Even without his powers, completely mortal, he was still dangerous, and she wouldn't allow herself to forget that. She _couldn't_ allow herself to forget that.

Her head was absolutely killing her- it had only been getting worse with time- so she clocked out early and decided to go back to her room to see if she had any painkillers with her. If not, she'd go check at the medical bay and ask for some good, old-fashioned ibuprofen. If that failed, she'd just try to sleep it off.

Darcy was just thinking that she should probably be more careful where she figuratively stepped when she walked around the corner and crashed straight into the person she didn't want to meet.

"Whoa!" Darcy cried out, nearly falling, but Loki's firm grip on her waist held her steady. "Sorry," she mumbled, attempting to hurry around him, but he hadn't moved his hands.

"Darcy, you seem… unwell." His brow furrowed in… if she didn't know better and her vision wasn't starting to blur, she'd say concern. _God, what's wrong with me? I don't usually get migraines…_ In fact, she'd only ever had _one_ in her life.

"Yeah, my head's killing me," she said, rubbing her eyes. "I'll be fine, though." However, that statement was utterly contradicted by the shaking step she took away from him, nearly losing her balance. Thankfully, Loki hadn't entirely stepped away yet, and slipped his arm around her to help keep her balanced.

_Yep, migraine_.

"Perhaps you should-"

"Could you just-" Darcy breathed deeply, trying to keep tears from spilling out her eyes. "Help me back… to my room… please?"

Loki didn't respond, but he didn't let go of her, either. In fact, he didn't let go until Darcy had safely, _slowly_, made her way into her room and collapsed onto her bed, the lights completely off. She should probably be really worried about the fact that she was alone in a darkened room with a dangerous man, but she was too tired to care.

He rested a hand on her forehead, as if checking to see if she had a fever, and _oh_, his skin was wonderfully cool.

"You're too warm," Loki muttered. He traced his fingers over her skin, down the side of her cheek, along her jaw. Everywhere he touched seemed to instantly cool. It was an odd sort of soothing sensation, like a mother lulling her child to sleep with a lullaby.

It was probably her imagination, but she even thought she heard him humming before she drifted into a blissful, migraine-numbing sleep.

X

"I found her in the hallway. She said her head hurt and she could barely walk, so I brought her back to her room." Loki leaned against the wall just outside Darcy's room, talking to Fury, Jane, and Thor. "Her body temperature was too high, so I brought it down."

Not a minute after he had managed to settle Darcy to sleep, Nick Fury had opened the door from outside. Loki had quickly shushed him and walked into the hallway, hoping the commotion wouldn't wake her, finding that Thor and Jane were also waiting. Fury had seen him away from his typical haunts by the tracking mechanism in the cuffs he always wore, and the director met Jane and Thor on the way, who were looking for Darcy. All four of them now stood in the hallway, talking in hushed voices.

"How did you do that?" Fury asked. If it was possible to sound suspicious, worried, and impressed all at once, Nick Fury was the only man in this realm who could accomplish it. "I thought you had no magic."

"It's not magic, it's my species." Loki said. "It's a fact of my biology- I can change the temperature of my skin and the temperature of whatever I touch, should I need to."

"When were you planning on telling us that?" The director did not sound happy.

"When it became relevant," Loki snapped.

"I'd like to point out that he hasn't hurt anyone," Jane said suddenly. "So is there really any point in worrying about what could have happened when it _didn't_?"

"Fair point," Thor agreed, nodding.

"So you're saying she was running a fever? Is she sick?" Jane was immediately back to the point, worrying about her friend.

"I do not know," Loki said, shaking his head. "She is sleeping. I could not do anything for the pain, but-"

"You did well, brother," Thor said softly. If Loki didn't know better, he'd say his brother looked almost _soft_. Surprised, definitely. Jane nodded in agreement.

"I'm glad you found her." She still seemed distrusting, but no one could blame her for that. Fury, for his part, was done with idle chatter.

"Check on her tomorrow morning," the director said to Jane, and then walked away.

It was going to take a lot more than one good deed to make anyone trust him again.

X

Loki was worried.

It was like a pinching inside his chest that wouldn't go away no matter how hard he tried, and just when he thought he was rid of it then it would snatch him again. It would go away soon. Probably. For the time being, though, it was simply _unsettling_.

He didn't worry- not about _people_. He hadn't worried for anyone in a long time, and he didn't particularly like that the feeling had started to creep back up on him now. However, worrying wasn't something you could control as easily as twiddling your fingers or walking into a certain room. It was impulsive, and it was consuming.

It wasn't _like_ him.

It was frightening.

Darcy seemed very tired lately- and the headache was just the beginning. She was normally bouncy and active, sassing the Agents good-naturedly and constantly moving around. Constantly. The woman couldn't stay still- she fidgeted in her chair after twenty seconds, walked around in a sort of half-dancing state, and if he had to bet he'd say she probably tossed around in her sleep, too. It wasn't like her to nearly fall asleep at her desk or at the supper table.

He couldn't put his finger on why she was so fatigued, and that bothered him to no end. Even without his magic, Loki had always been intuitive. It shouldn't be much trouble to discern what the problem was.

Perhaps what bothered him so much was why it even _bothered_ him. Darcy was a mortal- her life would be shorter than a tenth of what his had already been, and Loki was young for an Asgardi- a Jotun. Young for a _Jotun_, he reminded himself bitterly. Either way, her existence would have been of little consequence to him only a few short weeks ago, and now he was _worried_ for her.

Why? What made her different than the rest of them…?

She talked to him. She didn't flinch away from him when he asked her something, and she didn't automatically reach for her weapon when he entered the room. She was wary, but not paranoid, and she _listened_ when he talked. She even asked him about his side of the New York incident… but why? Why would she do that? He killed people, and she hadn't forgotten- he knew that for a fact from the night in the cell…

Darcy was strange to him, like a walking paradox. She was fiery and passionate, but not obsessive like Stark or Jane could be. She loved to laugh, but she knew when jokes were entirely uncalled for. She could be rash and unthinking… but she was also the only one who had ever thought there might be more to him than the man who destroyed Manhattan.

And that, he realized, was part of why he liked her. Not only was she an intriguing combination of hot and cold, a flood of emotions just waiting to explode, but she knew what he'd done- what he _was_- and still didn't treat him like the creature from children's nightmares.

Mortal children had likely never heard of Jotunheim, but Loki was certain there was some kind of nightmarish equivalent for the kind of person who would thoughtlessly murder hundreds of people… The thought wore at him more and more every day.

Thanos had wanted the Earth. Loki never wanted it- oh, the war Loki _had_ wanted, and it shamed him to think of it now. All those times that he thought the warriors of Asgard ridiculous with their lust for battle and blood… all of them discredited in their entirety.

Most of all Loki had wanted Asgard, and the throne, and he had wanted to show them the truth that the tesseract had shown him: that he would be a far better ruler than Thor, regardless of his (nonexistent) intentions for the throne at the time he was spurned. However, the more he thought, the more he saw the tesseract as a poison to his mind. He hadn't wanted the throne, had he?

No. No, he never had.

He'd wanted equality. He'd wanted to be seen as more than the second son, the less favored and liked of Asgard's princes. The revelation of his true heritage had been the final blow. Perhaps if it had come at another time, another place…

Perhaps if he hadn't been told all his life he was a monster.

There wasn't any time for "perhaps" now. What was done had been done, and there was no way to take it back. He acted rashly, harshly, against everything he'd ever been taught, and he acted in blind anger, blind because somewhere inside he truly thought what he was doing was best for Asgard… at first.

Darcy had shattered that notion with only a few words. She brought him back to reality, down off his pedestal and very much awake to the fact that if he wasn't careful he would spend the rest of eternity chained in a pit far under the earth. Granted, he had no son whose entrails could bind him, and no wife to catch the poison from the snake (oddly loyal, that woman in the story), but chained he would be, and it would not be pleasant. As much as he hated to admit it… she was right. He'd hurt and killed, taken his revenge where he could simply because he had the power, and if the tesseract had taken over a part of his mind, well, he'd welcomed it.

He'd welcomed the destruction. He'd welcomed the _insanity_.

And he'd barely managed to make it out alive.

There was nothing that could ever change that. Slowly but surely, he'd twisted himself into something that never should have been, and he had enjoyed every minute of it. The pain, the destruction, the _blood_- it all meant nothing to him. He felt nothing but anger, wanted nothing but a perverse version of justice that went by his rules and his laws, and he didn't care who stood in his way, because they would be cut down like weeds in his path, insignificant and weak.

Loki knew what he was- a liar, chiefly, but he had always been that; a thief, fighting for an item that nearly destroyed him; a murderer of thousands, indiscriminately killing and leaving destruction in his wake wherever he went, taking as if he were truly a god and not merely a being with just a little higher form of mortality. He took as if he had the power to create, like no man should have the right to take.

Not only that, but he had unleashed the wrath of Thanos and his army onto Asgard.

Loki had shaken the last of the tesseract's influence on that night in the cell, and it _burned_ him in an awful way to say that he owed his regained clarity to an enraged mortal… but it was so.

"Loki? Lo-ki?" Jane snapped her fingers in front of his face, shaking him out of his thoughts.

"Yes?"

"I was wondering if you'd thought about the possibility…" Jane prattled on about the tesseract's energy interacting with Midgardian technology, and Loki did his best to pay attention to her… and not to the woman across the room who was nearly falling over in her chair from exhaustion. He did need Jane's help if he ever wanted to return to Asgard, after all.

Did he _want_ to return?

A question for another day, Loki decided.

When Jane was distracted with a set of calculations, he stood and walked over to Darcy's work space. She was writing slowly on a sheet of paper, looking back and forth between it and a sheet of printed symbols.

"What are you working on?" he asked softly. Darcy jumped.

"Oh, um… just some messages that came through via satellite from Asgard. I can't figure out what language they're in, though, so I'm decoding it." She shrugged, like she did similar things every day. On second thought, she probably _did_.

"I see…" Loki leaned in to take a closer look, almost brushing her shoulder.

The symbols were old. Ancient, even for him, and that was saying something. If Thor sent the messages then they would be in a language he knew Jane could understand (most Asgardians knew many languages from many worlds because of their sheer age and travel experience), but this was something that was definitely not of this world.

This was the language of the creators of the tesseract. The oldest language. It was older than Odin himself and no one quite knew where it came from, or what any of it actually _meant_.

And Darcy was translating it.

It shouldn't be possible. The language didn't translate into anything- the brightest Asgardian scholars had been working on it for years, but every time that they thought there was a breakthrough, something turned out to be completely and totally wrong. The very thought of translation seemed to make the words uneasy, like they shifted around the potential for being understood and slipped from your fingers…

But she was translating it- bits and pieces at a time, but there it was in plain sight, written in perfectly normal English.

The only way she should- _would_ be able to do something like that was if the tesseract…

_No_.

No matter who or what you were, the tesseract always had an effect on whoever it touched. Touching it directly wasn't necessary- working in close proximity would be enough to promote attachment. Since it was created by Asgardians, Thor wouldn't be as susceptible to the chaotic tendencies of the cube as the others would, and Loki with his Jotun heritage would be right behind him. Granted, prolonged exposure to the thing had likely done something to his head over the time between falling off the bifrost and attempting to take over Earth, but it hadn't done near what it would do to a mortal in half- in a _tenth_ of the time.

It was what made mortals so easily susceptible to the tesseract's mind control- they were simply not built to be around that kind of force, especially not every day.

Especially not translating something that came _from_ it.

"Darcy," Loki said softly, placing a hand on her shoulder, "I think you should stop."

"Huh?" She turned to look at him, confused. "Why? What's wrong?"

He gestured to the paper she'd been writing on, and Darcy looked down.

And then she looked again, blinking.

"I didn't write that," she said, looking at the pencil in her hand as if it was a ticking bomb. "I didn't- that wasn't _there_ two seconds ago. I just barely figured out what _one_ of those things meant yesterday-" Loki cut her off with a finger to her lips.

"Please," he hissed, checking to see if Thor and Jane were watching. They weren't. "I promise you, I will explain everything, but _later_. Please listen to me now." The hand on her shoulder gripped just a bit tighter, and she seemed to grasp that he was at least very serious.

"What's happening to me?"

"I don't know," he lied. "I have an idea, but I want to be sure, and I don't want to alarm anyone." He also didn't want to alert the entire SHIELD facility to the fact that the object he once controlled may have taken possession of a woman, because he knew exactly who they would come running after.

"Ok." Darcy nodded, hesitantly at first, and then with more confidence. She scribbled a note on a scrap of paper, tucked the rest of the papers inside her notebook, and shut it. The scrap she handed to Loki before announcing that she was going to go get some "real" food and then head back to her room and take a nap.

Jane agreed that it was probably a good idea for her to get some sleep, barely looking up from her work. She didn't even seem to notice Loki's absence from her work table.

He counted to ten after Darcy left the room, just so he wouldn't be tempted to run after her, before he carefully unfolded the paper in his hand.

_Meet me on the walkway at 1:30 tonight. You owe me answers._

X

"It's a bit difficult to explain…"

"Please tell me what's happening to me," Darcy begged. It felt like her mind wasn't her own any longer. She wasn't ever one to work with an obsessive tendency on anything- she wasn't one to lose track of time or herself in this type of field. It wasn't _like_ her, and it was verging on scary.

"The tesseract," Loki said, as if that was all the explanation she needed.

"What about it?"

"That is the reason you've been unwell."

"Because I'm working near it?" she asked, confused. "_Everyone in the base_ is working near it. Why me?"

Loki licked his lips, apparently thinking about how exactly to put whatever he was about to say. Darcy noted with dismay that she had to drag her eyes away from his mouth, hoping that he hadn't seen her staring.

_Hey, Earth to Darcy. Now is not a good time for the bad boy kink to kick in, ok? Do you read me?_

"You were working on translations, correct?" Loki's voice brought her back down to reality, and in reality she was scared and shaking.

"Yes."

"Do you have any idea what you were actually translating?"

"Um…" Darcy bit her lip, unsure. Had she completely missed something again? "A message from Asgard?"

"Wrong," Loki said immediately. "A message from the tesseract."

_What_.

"The language that you have been working with is ancient- so ancient that no one knows how to translate it. The only way that you would be able to is if the tesseract… told you how." He winced, as if he thought she'd be angry.

"So you're saying the tesseract is, like, inside my _head_?" Darcy waved her hands around, gesturing to nothing in particular.

"Not exactly, but yes. The concept is far too complex-"

"What do I _do_, Loki?" Darcy cut him off before he could start prattling. Right now she wasn't concerned with technicalities- all she wanted was whatever happened to be making her tired and sick to go away, especially if it was some kind of _presence_ inside her mind!

"You wait. You don't work on the translations any more, you don't give it a way into your mind, and-" Loki reached down, cupping her face in his hands. "You get away from here."

Darcy stared. Loki's eyes were wide, a beautiful crystal blue. For just a moment he was close enough that she could feel his breath, and she thought that she just might drown in his eyes.

Too much.

Too close.

"Why are you helping me?" she whispered. Loki dropped his hands, taking a step away from her.

"Do you still want to know my side of the story?" He was avoiding her question, but Darcy decided to humor him for the moment.

"Yes."

"Then let's say that I owe you a debt, and leave it there." The sound of approaching footsteps echoed in the hallway, and they both jumped.

"Tomorrow you leave," Loki whispered. "Go back to the desert, and don't come back."

And then he turned and disappeared into the shadows.

X

Loki walked towards the lab the next day, hoping that Darcy would announce her intention to leave and be gone by the afternoon. As much as he didn't want the only person who could look at him without making him feel like they were constantly judging his every move to leave, she needed to go. It would be far more dangerous if the tesseract had a hold on her. Well, dangerous to Darcy- every case that interacted with the tesseract was different, but he didn't want to risk the possibility of it killing her.

She was already losing control of her own mind.

He met Jane and Thor walking down the hall, suspiciously late and rumpled-looking, but that wasn't a mental picture he needed, so Loki let it go and didn't say anything.

"Have you seen the Lady Darcy?" Thor asked. "She was not at breakfast today."

"I have not." Loki chose not to say any more, hoping she'd already left or spent her meal time packing.

Why did he _care_ so much? Loki scowled at the thought.

_Sentiment. Disgusting. I owe her a debt for…_

But what could he call it but Darcy's kindness? And wasn't kindness the oldest form of sentiment? Oldest but for one, and the oldest was far from his reach. He couldn't _afford_ to show sentiment- that was what caused all the trouble in the first place. Emotions were crippling things, fit for mortals and overly kind brothers… not for him. All the sentiment he once had was drained and beaten from him long, long ago. In fact, the only reason that Darcy was still alive at this point was probably because he hadn't had the chance to retaliate immediately when she snapped at him in the cell. There were hours between then and the morning that he had spent _thinking_, turning her words over and over in his mind…

He might have dwelled on this thought longer, but at that moment Jane opened the door to their lab space, and the sight was not at all what they expected.

There were translation papers all over the room, in piles, taped on walls, a complete account of the tesseract's language as it translated into English. It was astounding, that one person could do what a thousand others never could have… and it was frightening.

Loki ran forward immediately, sweeping the room with his eyes. She _had_ to be in there somewhere- if she wasn't, they were in more trouble than he thought.

"Darcy?" Jane called. "Darcy, are you in here?"

Yes, he found out two steps later, she was. Darcy was lying on the floor, unconscious.

Perhaps they _were_ in more trouble than he thought.

Loki immediately crouched down, checking for breath and a pulse. She was alive, breathing steady, but that could change at any time. He'd read the books on Asgard- they needed to move quickly. He picked up Darcy gently, cradling her body with her head against his chest.

"Are there doctors here?" he asked. Jane was pale, but she nodded. "Take me to them."

"What's wrong?" She asked even as they walked out the doorway.

"I'll explain later."

"No, you tell me now," Jane said firmly, still walking. Loki grunted in frustration- there was no way to explain things slowly.

"She's been working too close to the tesseract, and it's started to affect her mind."

"_Started_ to?!"

"As of now, there is still time." _Stay calm, follow Jane._

"Time for what?"

"To save her life." That statement alone seemed to spur Jane onwards.

The pair practically ran through the hallways to get to the medical bay, earning more than a few strange looks on the way and a small crowd of people rushing after them. As soon as Jane opened the doors Loki was barking orders out.

Unfortunately, no one seemed to understand what he was trying to tell them.

"Her mind is in a comatose state right now, but if we don't act fast her entire _body_ is going to shut down from the neural overload at any moment!" The doctor looked at him like he was insane, but thankfully Jane was there to drive his point home.

"Life support," she translated, frantic, "I think he means her heart isn't prepared to take this."

The doctor nodded, seemingly relieved to hear something familiar. Within minutes Darcy was hooked up to every kind of monitor imaginable, and, true to Loki's word… her heart rate dropped drastically. Five or six member of the medical staff spent the next few minutes in a frenzy of shouting, beeping, and connecting machines, (Loki had no idea what was happening for the most part- he knew bits and pieces, but most Midgardian medical technology was beyond him) until the room gradually quieted.

Jane hadn't moved from his side, watching the chaos and gradually growing paler. Finally, one of the doctors walked over with news. The woman removed her gloves as she spoke, clearly still skeptical about what exactly had just happened.

"She's stable, for now, and her heart is beating on its own," she said, and then turned to Loki. "Want to tell me what's going on?"

"No," Loki shook his head and walked quickly out of the room.

X

Within an hour there was a conference organized with Fury, the Avengers, and a few of the SHIELD medical staff members. Loki was doing his best to remain calm and patient, considering that none of them had ever encountered anything like this before. However, it was working out very well.

"Her brain waves almost look like she's dreaming, but we can't wake her up. It's like nothing I've ever seen." Bruce plopped down in a chair, removing his glasses. He'd gone into the medical bay to check on Darcy and could provide absolutely no new information about her state.

"Of course you can't wake her up," Loki snapped, annoyed.

"What do you mean, brother?" Thor asked, taking a step forward.

"It's the tesseract. It's taken control." He remained detached, even cold, as he spoke. It was the only way to keep himself on the rational side of things.

"What do you mean it's taken control?" Rodgers asked, clearly not following.

"I mean exactly what I said."

"Well, can't you do anything about it? You controlled it before-"

"I've been stripped of my magic," Loki interrupted, not willing to listen to a lecture about why he should take action. "I can do nothing at the present-"

A flurry of questions and comments suddenly filled the room, making it impossible for anyone to distinguish what was being said. Fury was on his phone in a minute, telling everyone to lock down the teseract room, while

"Enough!" Loki screamed, quieting the bunch in a hurry. "If you had listened to me before, then you might not have wasted so much time!" His shout echoed in the small room. Steve visibly jumped at the sudden outburst.

"Wasted it on what?" Natasha asked, ever the voice of reason.

"What's wrong with Darcy?" Jane spoke up from the corner of the room, looking absolutely terrified. Touching, almost, to see her so concerned for her friend.

"I've told you; the tesseract has her." He remained outwardly calm as he spoke, giving himself over to his cool, composed façade. It was easier this way, easier not to panic, easier to pretend that he didn't care if she lived or she died…

When in reality, his only friend in the world could die at an moment.

"Overexposure to the radiation can cause… varying effects. Gradual infiltration of the mind is not unheard of, especially among mortals."

"Mind control with no one controlling?" Barton chimed in. Of course he would be interested after what happened to him.

"Yes and no. The tesseract shows you a… a purpose. Its range of influence is powerful to say the least, but it's difficult to say exactly what happened-"

"Why her?" Fury asked suddenly, cutting Loki off mid-sentence. "Selvig studied that thing for months on end, and nothing like that ever happened to him, and we've all been around it for weeks now."

"He _studied_ it, but he never had a _part_ of it," Loki explained, starting to pace. "The language of the tesseract is ancient and dangerous, and Darcy has been meddling with it for far too long- letting it… play around in her mind. She had an opening into her subconscious that no one else had, and the tesseract took it."

"So you're saying the cube is alive?" Bruce asked slowly.

"No- yes- well, no, not in the fashion that you might consider alive. The tesseract is knowledge, and it wants to share that knowledge, but it typically does it a bit…"

"Malignantly?" Stark suggested. Loki nodded in agreement, stopping his pacing for the moment.

"And obsessively." He rubbed his eyes, trying to think. "Mortals are incredible susceptible to the tesseract's energy. It shows you… truth. It gives you a purpose, and you take to it because you _know_ it's your purpose."

"Ok, so, assuming Darcy's 'purpose' was to translate that language," Bruce began, gesturing as he talked, "then why did she collapse?" Loki couldn't keep the tiniest of smiles off his face at that.

"She's fighting it."

"I thought you couldn't fight it," Clint said, obviously still hostile. This was going to take some explaining…

"Not when under direct, immediate influence, but the tesseract has been slowly trying to invade Darcy's mind… I'd guess ever since she arrived. She's had time for her subconscious to realize something isn't right, and it's trying to shove out the tesseract."

"So basically the tesseract is like an organ transplant for Darcy's brain, and she's rejecting it big time," Natasha offered. Loki didn't quite understand the reference, but he'd read a few Midgardian medical books and thought he got the gist.

"Yes," he nodded. "I believe so."

"So what do we do?" Jane asked. She had a death grip on Thor's hand, obviously panicking. "We can't jet let her-"

"No, we can't." Loki said calmly. "And we won't."

"Why do you care what happens to her?" Rodgers asked, defensive. Loki turned to him, stunned. "It's a fair question. What reason do you have to care about anything that happens to her, and why should we believe that you do?"

Loki could feel the heat boiling in his chest, feel the rage coming on, but he forced himself to remain physically still even as he spoke through gritted teeth.

"I care because I owe this to her. Darcy is the only person on this base who has asked me anything about _myself_, anything about what I wanted or felt. The rest of you have ignored me when it was your turn to manage the prisoner, and when you did talk you talked _at_ me, not _to_ me-" Loki cut himself off before he got too carried away. "And you should believe me because if you don't, she will die."

Loki squeezed his eyes shut, slamming a hand against the wall in frustration. Darcy had been the first person to show him any humanity- Jane would talk to him sometimes because they worked together, but Darcy listened. She helped him purge the last of the tesseract's influence from his mind, even while he was in such close proximity to it, and the least he owed her was the same favor.

No one spoke for several seconds, or possibly several hours. It was hard to tell which when time was of the essence. It was Jane who finally broke the silence.

"What do we need to do?"

Loki turned around immediately, staring directly at Jane.

"We need to get her out of here. She needs to be away from the tesseract- several miles at least would be best."

"And _where_ do you propose we take her?" Fury asked. "It isn't like we can just move her anywhere we want-" Tony cleared his throat suggestively, raising his hand.

"Yes?" Loki asked, irked.

"Construction on Stark Tower is almost finished. It's not too far, so you could still keep in touch with the base, but it's far enough to satisfy magic man over there." Tony gestured to Loki, who had to fight not to scowl. "And, if you're worried about a prison break, the security is top-notch."

"Oh, he's _not_ coming," Rodgers said, shaking his head.

"Oh, but he is." Tony took a few steps towards him. For a small man her was really quite intimidating when he wanted to be. "Listen, bub, I don't like you any more than the rest of them do, but I _do_ like Darcy, and I think we need you to help her. But mark my words: the second you double-cross us, you have all of SHIELD out for your hide. Do I make myself clear?"

"Crystal."

X

Over the next few days, Loki spent time with Dr. Banner, Tony Stark, and Jane as they monitored Darcy's brain waves and vital signs. The Avengers and Fury were relocated to rooms in Stark tower, along with Darcy, Loki, and Jane. Darcy was under constant monitoring from both the traditional equipment and JARVIS.

"So, she's dreaming?" Tony asked. "And we can't wake her up. Has anyone tried kissing her yet?"

There was a general chorus of groans, even though Loki wasn't quite sure he understood the reference. Maybe Jane would explain it to him later… or maybe he'd just resolve to forget it, or find out for himself. No, asking Jane was probably not the greatest idea.

"Explain to me again what the tesseract is doing," Bruce said, speaking to Loki.

"It's infecting her mind. The tesseract wants to expand, but Darcy is fighting against it, so they're at a sort of… stalemate." It was difficult to describe what was happening in familiar Midgardian terms.

"A stalemate in a chess game to see who controls her brain?" Bruce raised an eyebrow.

"More or less." Loki shrugged.

"And you can't do anything about this?" Tony asked, possibly for the thousandth time that morning.

"As I've mentioned, I've been stripped of my magic. I can physically do no more than you." His mortal form was still strong, if wiry, but other than that he retained nothing from before Odin banished him to this realm.

"So… how do we get the tesseract _out_?" Jane fiddled with her pen absently as she spoke.

"Darcy has to do it herself," Loki said, sighing.

"_What_?" She seemed nothing short of exasperated at this point, even a little panicked. Loki had been trying to calm Jane down ever since the morning they found Darcy in the lab, be the voice of reason, but it didn't seem like anything would help. "She's _dreaming_, she's not even conscious! How can you expect-"

"If she were on Asgard, she would have died by now. We have the means to keep a heart beating, but not to diagnose what is wrong so quickly as you Midgardians do. This is the first time a case so far progressed has ever been given a chance." Medical studies were slightly superfluous on Asgard, as almost no one ever became sick. There were basic cures from old times, and a sound knowledge of anatomy, but nothing as technologically advanced as Midgard. It was one of the few redeeming features of this realm. "She's away from the tesseract, so its hold isn't as strong, but we can't do anything for her."

He leaned against a table, trying to think of any other possible solution. This was a delicate situation, and to proceed without caution could be Darcy's end…

"Maybe we can," Stark said suddenly, looking up.

"What are you thinking, Tony?" Bruce half-smiled, as if this was a normal routine.

"Ever hear someone talking in their sleep?" he asked, beginning to pace around the room. "My dad used to- he would call out for a screwdriver or a wire or something, and he wouldn't shut up until someone said 'here you go,' or something like that. Pepper says I do it, too."

"What do your sleeping habits have to do with Darcy?" Jane asked.

"No, no, no-" Bruce said, waving his hand. "I see where you're going."

"I don't," Loki said frankly.

"In his dream he reacted to someone's real time influence- specifically, their voice." Bruce tapped the table with his pencil, waiting for his point to sink in.

"Ah," Loki breathed, nodding. If Banner was correct, this might just have a chance at working.

"Nope, still not following." Jane sat back in her chair, waiting for an explanation.

"She can hear us. Probably," Loki muttered. Her eyes went wide with understanding or shock, or maybe both.

"Don't all great chess players have a coach?" Stark asked, obviously pleased with himself. "If we can talk to her, is there any way we could talk her through what to do?" All eyes in the room turned towards Loki.

"How would I know?" He asked, half-chuckling nervously.

"You're the only one who's had any direct interaction with the tesseract," Bruce pointed out.

"She barely knows me. She won't respond-"

"That's where you're wrong, space boy," Stark interrupted, clapping his hands together. "It doesn't really matter who hands you the wrench. What matters is how they hand it to you."

"Speak clearly, Stark," Loki groaned.

"Hearing probably isn't exclusive to people she knows well, is it?" Tony asked. No one responded, knowing he wound answer it himself. "Probably not. So it's not necessarily who's talking that matters, it's what they _say_."

"We've been talking for days and she hasn't responded," Jane pointed out. She wasn't necessarily skeptical so much as she liked knowing that things would definitely work before trying them on living, breathing subjects.

"We haven't been talking _to_ her," Loki said. "If she hears anything right now, it's passive listening. It's a good idea, in theory. A… _long_ _shot_, as you Midgardians say, but there is a possibility it could work." Tony looked surprised that Loki actually agreed with his plan.

"So how do we get her out of passive listening state?" Bruce asked.

"Why don't we just call her name?" Jane said with a shrug. Bruce blinked, unconvinced. "I had this professor in college once, and he used to just casually insert his students' names into his lecture. Like, randomly. He wasn't calling on us or anything, but people react to the sound of their own names like a reflex, and it keeps you alert."

"Sounds good to me." Bruce said with a shrug.

"Ok! We have a plan." Tony spun around theatrically. "Who's taking first watch with Sleeping Beauty?"

X

Darcy had no idea where she was.

The last thing she remembered was walking towards the lab to pick up a few of her things before telling Fury that she was leaving the base (she hadn't quite figured out her explanation for that, but she planned on winging it), and then everything went black.

She woke up in a thick fog, lying on hard, dusty ground. Standing, she found the fog covered the ground up to her knees, almost like dry ice. It didn't seem to end, whichever way she looked. There was fog and a sky so dark blue that it was almost black, and the fog and the sky went on forever until she couldn't quite tell which was which. Every few minutes a streak of ice-blue lightning blazed through the sky with a deafening crack, even though there was no rain or other thunder. The wind whipped around her, blowing the fog into strange, swirling patters. The air rushing by did not sound like air- it sounded like the whispers of a million voices, bits and pieces of a million memories.

Darcy was alone, and she was very afraid.

At first she tried calling out, but there was no response, and her voice sounded tiny no matter how loudly she tried to yell.

She tried running, but every direction looked the same.

She tried pinching herself, but apparently she wasn't dreaming.

So she sat, and she watched the lightning for seconds, or minutes, or hours, or days. Truthfully, Darcy wasn't sure how much time had passed before she stood and started walking.

Step.

Step.

Step.

One foot in front of the other, going nowhere and not really caring. She wasn't tired, not really, and walking kept her alert for the most part. It made her think, it made her move. It told her she was still alive, no matter what this strange place made of fog and blue lightning happened to be.

After a long time, she allowed herself to think.

She thought a little, and she thought a little more, and she thought about what on earth could have put her in this place. Loki had said something about the tesseract, hadn't he? Everything was so fuzzy- her memories were fading fast.

What was her name? How did she come to be here? Why was she here? What was she supposed to do? There were too many questions and not enough of her left to answer them. She felt like an empty husk, swept away by the wind… And the blue lightning flashed again.

The tesseract… the tesseract was blue, wasn't it?

Yes, a blue cube. Blue like the lightning, the exact same blue.

Blue like his eyes.

_Get out_, they said, _get out of here._

She didn't know how. She didn't know what to do, and she felt lost in the memory of the blue eyes and the cube, the flashes of lightning, and suddenly she was falling, falling deeper and deeper, and if she feel far enough-

"Darcy…"

She looked up, stunned. She was lying on the ground, staring up at the sky. That was a voice, wasn't it? A voice calling to her… to Darcy. Darcy was her name. She could remember now.

"Darcy, can you hear me?"

_Yes, yes!_

"Darcy?"

She pulled herself up off the ground with no little effort, looking around for the source of the sound. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere all at the same time.

"Darcy, I… I do not know if you can hear me, but if you can, I need you to listen."

_I'm here_, she tried to scream. _I'm here- I can hear everything!_ But no matter how hard she tried she couldn't make a sound.

"You can pull yourself out of this- you're strong enough to do it. Just…" A pause. "Follow my voice."

_How?_

X

Jane, Thor, Bruce, Tony, and Loki took turns talking to Darcy at her bedside- it took only a short time to register a change in her brain activity, but two weeks later there was still no verbal response, and she was still deeply asleep in a secluded room in Stark Tower.

Mostly they tried talking to her directly, but sometimes one of them would read from a book or tell jokes, something to break up the monotony and still hopefully grab her attention.

In truth, Loki was near the point of giving up. They all were.

The only real things that kept them going were Dr. Banner's continued observations of Darcy's brain activity and the steady beeping of the heart monitor. She was still alive, and _somewhere_ she was still conscious. Under normal circumstances, Loki would have given it up already, but he knew that if Darcy died then he would be blamed, and he didn't need any more blood on his hands while he was under scrutiny.

He wasn't sure he wanted any more blood on his hands.

In the past he hadn't minded, not really. Death, especially the deaths of others, was a means to an end. It was a way to achieve what he wanted; a simple, effective way that left no witnesses to deal with later on.

Now it was different.

Now all he could see was the same dark-haired woman that lay unconscious in the next room over yelling at him through the glass of his temporary prison. He could hear her accusations, hear her scream about the lives he ruined and the people he hurt, all while maintaining that he never had the right.

It was only seeing the city that made him understand her words, though.

The trip from the underground SHIELD facility haunted him in ways that he didn't think was possible. There were buildings crippled and crumbling, still under repair even months after the ordeal. There were families torn apart- missing person posters decorated the alley walls- and people living on the streets. New York was always one to carry on, Stark had said bitterly, but Loki knew that what he saw couldn't be even half of the _real_ aftermath.

It was an unfamiliar feeling, to hurt for other people.

It had been so long since he'd felt anything for anyone but himself, and after stepping back from the tesseract, back from everything he'd done and everything he could have done without being captured… the thought actually made him feel sick to his stomach. What had happened to him? What had he turned into?

The answer was obvious, really.

He was the monster that everyone said he was.

Driven by revenge, mad for power, determined to make people see him as something other than a Frost Giant or the second son, more than the too-skinny child who turned to magic rather than swords, Loki had molded himself into the very last thing he had ever wanted to become. And it stung to know that- it burned like acid against his very heart, and it burned even more that there was nothing he could do to change it.

Talking to Darcy while she was in her sleeping state (what the others had started to refer to as a "tesseract coma") was more than a little strange. He knew that, on some level, she could hear and perceive what they were saying- it might even be the reason she was still fighting against the tesseract's hold- but there was no way to tell how much she actually _understood_.

If you didn't know any better, Darcy almost looked… peaceful. Her dark hair fanned out across the white sheets, lips slightly parted, breathing rhythmic and even. She was pale, perhaps from lack of nutrition besides the IV drip in her right arm.

"Darcy…" Loki began, speaking softly and hoping that no one could hear him. Of course, that was probably pointless considering the ridiculous amount of microphones and security cameras around Stark Tower, but he could always hope and pretend for the time being.

"I…" He didn't know what to say. The past few days he'd babbled about thing happening around Stark Tower, and probably would have resorted to reading a novel aloud by now if there were any that he found remotely interesting.

However, Loki also thought that reading aloud was probably not the best option if they wanted Darcy to pick up on them talking to her subconsciously. She would probably just interpret it as background noise. He couldn't think of anything interesting to talk about, though. There was nothing that would grab her attention, nothing that might jerk her out of her subconscious.

As someone who had been under even a tiny bit of the tesseract's influence, Loki knew that it took a shock to wake someone up from it. A physical shock would do… sometimes. The beating from the Hulk hadn't done anything for him, but a hard blow to the head ad been enough to release the Hawk and Selvig from their mind-controlled state.

So what could he shock her with? What could grab her attention, make her listen?

It was a thought, a good one. It might work if the shock were enough- the tesseract had been watching, monitoring, holding her mind in its grasp for longer than just these few days. It thought it knew how Darcy's mind worked, just like it thought it knew how Loki's mind worked. That was the great beauty and the great downfall of the tesseract- _truth_- because truth hidden away is the same as a lie to be used against you.

The tesseract couldn't know what it hadn't seen because _Darcy_ didn't know what it hadn't seen… so this would have to be something new.

Jane had tried different things several times, talking about her life and their memories- Loki heard bits and pieces from through the door- but nothing was strong enough. It had to be something truthful, something she was completely unprepared to hear…

And Loki had no idea at all what that might be.

Frustrated, he took hold of Darcy's limp hand, clasping it tightly between both of his own. He huffed, hanging his head, black hair falling in his eyes.

"I'm sorry," he whispered.

The words came out before he could stop them, sincere but puzzling. What was he sorry _for_? There were far too many things to narrow down to just _one_ regret, but he knew that he was sorry for _something_. That was the ache in his chest, the shame and guilt that he'd pushed aside in favor of insanity and selfishness, of revenge that would never come to pass. All the sorrow and anger had built up around his walls, and as they slowly crumbled it fell over the side in waves.

He was doing his best to keep as many of the walls up as he could, even as the pain washed over the sides and into his heart, fresh as the day he first felt it.

Nearly lost in his thoughts, Loki almost didn't notice the slight movement against his hand…

And the next slight movement.

He jumped involuntarily, looking down to make sure he hadn't imagined it. Darcy's fingers had shifted slightly to barely grasp his own, though they now lay still. It was a start- a very good start. A _breakthrough_, really…

"Darcy, can you hear me?" Loki asked, working on a hunch. No response.

"Darcy, I… I do not know if you can hear me, but if you can, I need you to listen. You can pull yourself out of this- you're strong enough to do it. Just…" What could he tell her? This could be the only chance to give her something to hold on to…

"Follow my voice."

The order came out with more confidence that Loki actually had.

X

"What do you mean she _responded_?" Jane asked.

"I talked to her, and she- she moved her hand," Loki said. Banner nodded slowly, though Loki seriously doubted that any of them would actually believe him.

"I can see the change in readings here…" Bruce pointed to the numbers and diagrams on the computer screen, motioning towards the time close to when Darcy had first started to react to him several hours ago.

He hadn't wanted to break off the contact, so Loki had kept talking to her until Jane came in to take her shift, and that was when he broke the news. He talked about everything- about the weather, about Thor, about Asgard, about anything he could possibly think of…

About regret.

Thankfully, Jane did not hear any of the latter part. She did call in Stark and Banner to talk, though, and the four now stood around Darcy, discussing what to do next.

"So that means-"

But they never did find out what Jane was going to say, because suddenly Darcy's heart rate went wild.

"What the hell is that?!" Stark asked. The monitor beeped out a steady rhythm, far faster than it should have been and too sudden to be natural. The only difference was that this time Loki knew exactly what was happening… or at least, he thought he might.

"I- I don't know!" Banner said, gesturing wildly. "It looks like she's still dreaming-"

"She's not- she's having a nightmare," he said quietly. "The tesseract is fighting back."

Stark and Banner jabbered for a moment more before Jane decided to take the matter into her own hands, leaning over to talk to her unconscious friend.

"Darcy? Darcy, it's Jane. I know you're scared, but if you hear me then you have to calm down, alright?" she whispered, sounding uncannily like a mother soothing a child. "We're going to get you out of this. Breathe, ok? In and out."

Jane continued to talk softly while the scientists argued and Loki stood, mesmerized by this strange display of sisterly affection. Though the two women were close, Jane was never nearly as open with her emotions as Darcy, and it was fascinating to see her in such a raw, open state. Perhaps a new respect for the astrophysics would come out of this… Miraculously, and maddeningly slowly, Darcy's heart rate dropped. Loki silently let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding.

"We're running out of time," he said, shaking his head. "She needs to fight her way out of the mental hold or she'll die within days-"

"Well, how did you get her to respond to you the last time?" Banner asked, frantically looking over readings.

"I- I tried to say something that would shock her," Loki said, fumbling. There was no point in telling them _exactly_ what had been said, was there? "She seemed to respond to things that would normally elicit a severe reaction. I believe it caused a sort of disturbance in the tesseract's hold on her. It didn't know what to expect, so it couldn't keep control during her reaction-"

"I've got it!" Tony said, snapping his fingers. "Well, actually, it's just a hunch-"

"Tony!" Jane snapped, motioning for him to get on with it.

"Any of you guys ever seen Doctor Who?" Tony asked, eyebrows raised.

"I don't really think now's the time-" Jane began, but Bruce but her off.

"Yeah, a couple episodes. Why?" He seemed to think that it was best to just humor Tony's whims and need to explain things- it made the whole process go faster in the long run.

"There's one where the Doctor asks for a shock to help him with a detox , and the shock…" Tony paused, glancing sideways at Bruce and Loki. "Do you guys still believe in fairy tales?"

Loki had no idea what the man was talking about, but apparently Banner understood.

"No! Absolutely not!" He shook his head fiercely. Jane seemed to agree.

"You seriously think that's going to work, Tony?"

"Well, she's still at least minimally aware and she _needs_ a shock, right? And I really don't think pumping adrenaline into her IV is going to do the trick-"

"Well, why can't you do it?" Banner asked. Loki stood silently, still trying to pinpoint exactly what Stark wanted someone to do.

"Because Pepper is downstairs and I will never hear the end of it," Stark said matter-of-factly. "Thor's spoken for, and Barton- actually, if I were Barton I wouldn't _dare_ with Agent Romanoff within a hundred miles of the area, or maybe even on the planet… Anyways, you know the Cap'n won't, so that leaves you and him."

"No," Banner said firmly.

"Maybe I wasn't talking to you," Stark said pointedly. Loki suddenly felt very alone, put on the spot with no idea of what to say.

_What's the matter? Silver tongue turn to lead?_

He inwardly winced at the memory, but pushed it aside quickly.

"What?" Loki asked, blinking.

"It would definitely be a shock," Stark offered. Apparently everyone in the room knew some kind of secret Midgardian reference that he didn't understand. Jane tilted her head slightly, studying him.

"They don't tell the Sleeping Beauty story in Asgard, do they?" she asked.

No, no they did not.

Banner, Stark, and Jane spent the next twenty minutes relating the rather unfortunate (and simplistic, though they assured him the story was meant for children) tale of Sleeping Beauty, and Stark made another reference to Doctor What or whatever it was, all to try to explain why someone should kiss Darcy. At the end of the babble he finally understood the reference to the tale, but he most definitely did not agree.

"That sounds like a very, very bad idea," Loki said flatly. Stark barely deflated.

"Why's that?"

"The tesseract is inside her mind, feeding off her emotions and thoughts, off anything it can possibly use to control that one little piece of Darcy that's still fighting against its influence," he explained. "I know how that feels. It's… overwhelming. With any kind of close interaction it is possible for the tesseract to see into the person who happens to be close by-"

"But _you_ touched her earlier," Jane said. Loki had to fight to school his expression.

"The tesseract has already seen me," he said calmly. It had seen every inch, every single particle of his soul over the brief time that Loki had let the blue cube dictate his every action. There was nothing left that it hadn't seen already, nothing that it didn't already know…

"Then what are you worried about?" Banner asked.

"It's also possible for Darcy to see through the tesseract," he said. No one even flinched. Loki sighed, exasperated, though he realized that he probably shouldn't be. "Intimate physical contact could cause a kind of projection into her mind that could possibly overwhelm her senses before she even wakes."

"A projection of what?" Jane asked. "Of… us?"

"More or less," Loki shrugged, but under his cool composure he was shaking. Darcy would be able to see everything the tesseract could see- she likely could see some of it already just from touching her a few days ago. Or, she _might_ be able to. "The fact that the tesseract has already been inside my mind makes it… less likely to harm her. Any kind of emotional connection would simply amplify what might already be projected-"

"Which is why you need to do it," Tony said with a shrug. Loki stared.

"Didn't you hear the word 'overwhelm,' Tony?" Jane rubbed her eyes, clearly at wit's end.

"No, no, no- listen. If the tesseract already knows him, maybe it won't use Darcy as a conduit to get every last drop of information about us out. It already knows everything about Loki- why waste Darcy's brain on finding out what it already knows?"

"And then she'd still get the shock, and it might not send her into sensory overload…" Bruce mumbled, nodding.

"I am _not_-"

"Do you _want_ her to live?!" Tony asked angrily, cutting Loki off mid-sentence. "Because this might be our only shot. You said yourself that you owe it to her, she _definitely_ wouldn't be expecting you to do it, and you don't have an '_emotional_ _attachment_,' right?"

Loki rubbed his eyes, torn. Yes, he wanted to help Darcy, but… he knew what would happen.

It was true, the tesseract would likely use Darcy as a conduit for anyone it wanted to glean information from- it looked into your very soul and found out all that you were. Actually, it was likely the tesseract had been slowly gathering information through Darcy for a while now, but any kind of… _intimate_ contact… would increase what the tesseract could do.

And as much as he hated to admit it… Stark was right. He was the best candidate for the job- the tesseract had the least information to glean from him, so it posed the least danger to Darcy, and the kiss plan really wasn't a bad idea.

In reality, it wasn't the kiss itself. He might not be Thor, but he _was_ a prince, and he'd known more than kisses from women for many reasons. Mostly they were memories he preferred not to dwell on, but after those times, kissing in itself was not something he despised the idea of.

It was the emotional connection bit that worried him.

Somewhere in the back of his mind it nagged at him, _mocked_ him. Stark seemed incredibly suggestive about the whole thing, but Loki chose not to pay him any mind. It was probably just stark up to his usual routine of teasing everyone in sight mercilessly. He owed Darcy a debt- that was all. She helped him shake the tesseract, and he would return the favor.

_I've got red in my ledger. I'd like to wipe it out._

Against his will the Black Widow's voice rang out in his mind.

And he thought _her_ ledger was red.

Loki had a thousand lives tainting his.

"Alright," he sighed. Stark smirked, pleased. "But if you'll at least give me the illusion of privacy, I'd be pleased," Loki snapped. There were cameras everywhere, but just being alone would be better than having the three of them staring over his shoulder.

Jane immediately walked out, dragging Tony by the collar and followed by a chucking Bruce.

What was that Midgardian expression? Ah.

_Here goes nothing._

* * *

Well, this plot took a turn I wasn't expecting...

Hello all! I just wanted to say thank you so much for the absolutely incredible support. As of today (Friday) I'll be at band camp until next Sunday, so I don't know when the next update will be since the chapters are pretty darn long, but I hope that this is enough to hold you over for a while.

Thanks again! If anyone reviews I will try to get back to them bit by bit over the course of the week, between when band camp eats my life... OH, and there's sort of a potential that the rating for this might go up. Maybe.


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